Kaliningrad (RUSSIA) – Nuclear-capable missiles in Belarus. Threats to Lithuania. Tension with Poland. The fifth month of the so-called Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine begins with the worst auspices. The meeting a St.Pietroburgo between the Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin and the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko. The Russian ally said he was concerned about the “aggressive”, “confrontational” and “repugnant” policies of his neighbors Lithuania and Poland. And he asked Putin to help Minsk organize a “symmetrical response” to what, according to him, would be NATO nuclear-armed fighter flights near the borders of the Belarus. “Minsk must be ready for anything, including the use of serious weapons to defend our homeland from Brest to Vladivostok,” she said, putting Belarus and Russia under the same umbrella.
The meeting in St. Petersburg
Putin replied that he does not see the need for a symmetrical response at the moment, but that Russian-made Su-25 fighters in service in the Belarusian army “could be updated appropriately.” “This modernization – he added – should be carried out in aircraft factories in Russia and staff training should begin accordingly.” When Lukashenko then asked him to “adapt” his devices to carry nuclear weapons, he replied: “We will agree on how to achieve this.” But he finally promised that “in the next few months” Russia will transfer Iskander-M tactical missile systems, which have a range of up to 500 kilometers and are capable of carrying nuclear warheads, to Minsk. “They can use ballistic or cruise missiles, in their conventional and nuclear versions,” Putin said. After all, he added, European countries and the US possess “200 tactical nuclear weapons ready for potential use”. Statements that are worrying after the constitutional referendum held last February by Lukashenko abolished nuclear neutrality in Belarus, a country on the border with Ukraine and several NATO member states.
Kaliningrad blockade, Lithuania applies sanctions. Europe-Russia tension is rekindled
by Gianluca Di Feo
Eyes on Suwalki’s corridor
As if that were not enough, to add fuel to the fire, commenting on the so-called “Kaliningrad blockade”, that is the decision by Lithuania to restrict the transit on its soil of EU-sanctioned goods bound for Russia to its exclave on the Baltic Sea, the Belarusian president he said it “amounts to a declaration of war”. “Things like that are unacceptable.” Words that come as the Russian media speculate that one of the “practical responses” threatened by Moscow in retaliation to the Lithuanian ban may be the creation of the so-called “Suwalki Corridor”: that is, the occupation of the strip of land that runs along the border between Poland and Lithuania which would link the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to Belarus, isolating the Baltic countries from the rest of the European Union. NATO has already warned that, in the event of an attack, it would be ready to defend Vilnius under Article 5 of the Alliance. Ukraine is also worried and yesterday accused Moscow of wanting to “drag” Minsk into the conflict.
Clash over Kaliningrad, Russia could isolate the Baltic countries. The USA: NATO ready to defend you
by our correspondent Rosalba Castelletti
Tensions also with Poland
Tensions are also mounting with Poland, an EU and NATO member country that supplies arms to Kiev. Yesterday, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed in its daily bulletin that it had killed “up to 80 Polish mercenaries” in a bombing raid in eastern Ukraine. This claim comes in the aftermath of the removal of the Polish flag from the Katyn memorial commemorating the 1940 massacre of about 25,000 Poles by order of Stalin. “There can be no Polish flag on a Russian memorial. All the more so after the Russophobic statements of Polish politicians,” Smolensk mayor Andrei Borisov wrote on social media. “Katyn is a Russian memorial”.
Kaliningrad, among the truck drivers queuing at the border: “It was better in the USSR”
by our correspondent Rosalba Castelletti
