| Jan van den Berghe |
12 juli 2024 09:35 |
Citaat:
Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Skobelev
(Bericht 10385472)
Zoals ik gisteren al schreef. Oekraïne bij de navo is de totale vernietiging van Oekraïne. En kijk, vandaag zegt Lavrov hetzelfde.
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Lavrov deed al eerder gelijkaardige uitspraken. Anders mag eerst keffertje Medvedev dat doen, maar, kijk, nu mag Lavrov ook weer eens de pitbull van dienst spelen. Ach, we kennen het al, dat gedreig en gegrom uit Moskou. Indertijd dreigde Moskou ook de Finnen af als ze er ook nog maar aan zouden denken om toe te treden tot de NAVO. De Finnen haalden hun schouders op, lachten eens en deden wat ze moesten doen. En Poetin en zijn kornuiten... trokken snel hun kak weer in.
Citaat:
Russia warns of nuclear weapons in Baltic if Sweden and Finland join Nato
Lithuania plays down threat, claiming Russians already have such weapons in Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad
Jon Henley and Julian Borger
Thu 14 Apr 2022 20.02 CEST
Moscow has said it will be forced to strengthen its defences in the Baltic if Finland and Sweden join Nato, including by deploying nuclear weapons, as the war in Ukraine entered its seventh week and the country braced for a major attack in the east.
However, the Lithuanian defence minister, Arvydas Anušauskas, claimed on Thursday that Russia already had nuclear weapons stored in its Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, which borders Lithuania and Poland. That claim has not been independently verified, but the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) reported in 2018 that nuclear weapon storage bunkers in Kaliningrad had been upgraded.
The Russian former president Dmitry Medvedev, a senior member of Russia’s security council, said on Thursday that all its forces in the region would be bolstered if the two Nordic countries joined the US-led alliance.
Medvedev’s threat is the latest of many instances of nuclear sabre-rattling from the Kremlin aimed at deterring western military intervention on behalf of Ukraine.
“We’re obviously very concerned,” said the CIA director, William Burns. “Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they’ve faced so far militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons.”
But Burns added: “While we’ve seen some rhetorical posturing on the part of the Kremlin, moving to higher nuclear alert levels, so far we haven’t seen a lot of practical evidence of the kind of deployments or military dispositions that we would reinforce that concern.”
Finland and Sweden are deliberating over whether to abandon decades of military non-alignment and join Nato, with the two Nordic countries’ leaders saying Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine has changed Europe’s “whole security landscape”.
Their accession to the alliance would more than double Russia’s land border with Nato members, Medvedev said. “Naturally, we will have to reinforce these borders” by bolstering ground, air and naval defences in the region, he said.
Medvedev, a close ally of Vladimir Putin, explicitly raised the nuclear threat, saying Finnish and Swedish Nato membership would mean there could be “no more talk of any nuclear-free status for the Baltic – the balance must be restored”.
Russia had “not taken such measures and was not going to”, he said. “But if our hand is forced, well … take note it wasn’t us who proposed this.”
Russia borders the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Alexander Grushko, said Moscow would take the security and defence measures that it would deem necessary if Sweden and Finland join Nato, adding that the move would seriously worsen the military situation and lead to “the most undesirable consequences”.
Anušauskas described the Russian threat as “rather strange” because, he said, nuclear weapons “have always been kept” in Kaliningrad. “They keep nuclear weapons, delivery vehicles, and have warehouses,” he told the Baltic News Service. “The international community and countries in the region are perfectly aware of that.”
In 2018 the FAS analysed satellite images and concluded that the Russians had carried out a major renovation of what appeared to be “an active nuclear weapons storage site in the Kaliningrad region”. However, the analysts were unable to determine whether nuclear warheads were already being stored there, were imminently about to arrive, or would be moved there in a crisis.
“There is indeed a storage site in Kaliningrad, known as Kolosovka. That is where nuclear weapons for all units located in Kaliningrad would be,” said Pavel Podvig, a military expert based in Geneva who runs a research project on Russian nuclear forces. “There are conflicting reports about whether Russia actually has any weapons in Kolosovka. We don’t really know.”
Hans Kristensen, the director of the nuclear information project at FAS, said work was still going on at the storage bunkers. “They’re working on security perimeter now. So I doubt there are warheads in there,” Kristensen said.
Finland’s prime minister, Sanna Marin, said on Wednesday that Finland, which shares an 810-mile (1,300km) border with Russia, was likely to decide on a Nato application “within weeks”, while her Swedish counterpart, Magdalena Andersson, said there was “no point delaying” the decision.
(...)
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...land-join-nato
Maar in juni van dat jaar klonk het al plots anders:
Citaat:
Putin issues fresh warning to Finland and Sweden on installing Nato infrastructure
President says Moscow would respond ‘symmetrically’ to any deployments, and foreign ministry accuses Nato of trying to destabilise Russian society
Andrew Roth
Thu 30 Jun 2022 00.22 CEST
(...)
“If Finland and Sweden wish to, they can join. That’s up to them. They can join whatever they want.”
(...)
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...finland-sweden |
