Let’s all hope that Chinese President Xi Jinping sees this outrage as a personal affront and gives his “friend” in Moscow a good talking to at once.
Only days ago, Xi was paying Russian President Vladimir Putin a visit — to discuss their collaboration, but also to talk him out of nuclear escalation and into a peace process with Kyiv. This weekend, Putin did the exact opposite.
In perhaps the most insidious of his many nuclear threats against Ukraine and the West, Putin announced that he would station tactical nukes in Belarus, his fellow dictatorship and vassal state just to the west. From there, even missiles and jets with shortish ranges could strike targets in Ukraine or central Europe.
Disingenuously as ever, Putin claims that this move won’t breach Russia’s obligations under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. His logic is that he, rather than Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, would retain control over the warheads and the missiles that would carry them.
In reality, Putin is once again ignoring — or perhaps relishing — the bitter irony of the perfidious path he followed to this moment in history. In the so-called Budapest Memorandum of 1994, both Ukraine and Belarus — as well as the third former Soviet republic then in possession of nukes, Kazakhstan — agreed to surrender their atomic arsenals in return for security guarantees from Moscow.