BIDEN WARNS RISK OF PUTIN USING TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS ‘REAL’

Tue 20 June 2023:

US president Joe Biden says the threat of Russian president Vladimir Putin using tactical nuclear weapons is “real”, days after denouncing Russia’s deployment of such weapons in Belarus. Reuters reports:

On Saturday, Biden called Putin’s announcement that Russia had deployed its first tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus “absolutely irresponsible”.

“When I was out here about two years ago saying I worried about the Colorado river drying up, everybody looked at me like I was crazy,” Biden told a group of donors in California on Monday.

“They looked at me like when I said I worry about Putin using tactical nuclear weapons. It’s real,” Biden said.

Last week, Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko said his country had started taking delivery of Russian tactical nuclear weapons, some of which he said were three times more powerful than the atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The deployment is Russia’s first move of such warheads – shorter-range, less powerful nuclear weapons that could be used on the battlefield – outside Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Interestingly, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) appears to contradict Biden’s assessment of the risks posed by Russia’s deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus. In its latest analysis, the US think tank writes:

ISW has long assessed that Russia will likely keep tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus in order to consolidate de facto control of Belarus but maintains that this deployment is extraordinarily unlikely to have battlefield impacts in Ukraine.

Moscow launches Ukraine-wide overnight attacks

Russia launched attacks across Ukraine overnight, including on the capital Kyiv and the western city of Lviv, close to the border with Poland.

Kyiv’s military administration said Moscow had launched a drone attack in the early hours of Tuesday, warning residents to find shelter, in a post on the Telegram messaging app. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

The administration later said the city’s air defences had detected and destroyed about two-dozen Iranian-made Shahed drones in the “massive air attack”. It was the second drone attack on the city since the beginning of the month, it said.

In Lviv, a piece of “critical infrastructure” was hit and set on fire, the city’s military administration said, but there were no injuries. Earlier, the city’s mayor, Andriy Sadovy reported explosions in Lviv and the surrounding area. It was not clear if the explosions came from air defences or from missile strikes.

Air raid alerts also sounded in Zaporizhzhia, the Kyiv Independent reported, noting that the southern city has been heavily targeted by Russian artillery over the past few days.

The situation in the city was “stable” despite a “a restless and noisy night” the head of the city council, Anatoly Kurtev, later said on Telegram. No injuries were reported and there was no damage to residential buildings while all utility systems were working as normal, he said.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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