Russian Armed Forces have commenced a three-day series of nuclear weapons exercises in Belarus amidst concerns about Putin’s potential intentions to invade Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania.
The drills, scheduled to conclude on Thursday, involve over 64,000 military personnel and more than 7,800 units of equipment. Belarus has initiated nuclear weapons drills in collaboration with Russia to enhance the readiness of the armed forces to utilize modern destructive capabilities, including specialized ammunition, as announced by the Belarusian Defence Ministry on Monday.
During these exercises, Belarusian citizens have been prohibited from entering forests near the borders with Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine.
Volya, a war monitoring channel, cautioned that there are indications of misinformation suggesting that Russian President Vladimir Putin is contemplating a limited incursion into the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, rather than a summer offensive in Ukraine’s Donbas region, posing a significant challenge to NATO.
“Signals pointing in this specific direction are increasingly concerning,” stated Volya. “Since mid-March, reports from sources within the Russian Ministry of Defence and other entities indicate that Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade the Baltic states have progressed to an advanced stage.”
The objective is not to initiate conflict with NATO but to provoke a major crisis within the alliance by invading Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, with the ultimate goal of causing its effective disintegration.
Additionally, Putin is reportedly amassing hundreds of thousands of “unkillable” fiber-optic drones in secret, possibly for a future assault on NATO, according to sources from the channel.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry criticized the three-day drills, denouncing Russia and Belarus’ nuclear collaboration as a remarkable threat to global security arrangements. It highlighted that the exercises breach the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by involving a non-nuclear state in activities related to nuclear weapons readiness.
A statement released by Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry expressed concerns about the Kremlin transforming Belarus into a nuclear stronghold near NATO borders, which could legitimize the global proliferation of nuclear arms and establish a dangerous precedent for other authoritarian regimes.
