In May, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said this to Russian TV audiences, per Reuters: “No one is against Kazakhstan and other countries having the same close relations that we have with the Russian Federation,” Lukashenko said. “If someone is worried … (then) it is very simple: join in the Union State of Belarus and Russia. That’s all: there will be nuclear weapons for everyone.”
Lukashenko, a people-pleaser when it comes to Putin, revealed where Putin’s foreign policy strategy and active measures come together. Putin bids autocrats, dictators, and their favored elites to preserve their power by obtaining nuclear arms as vassal states under a new Soviet Union based on slavic-nationalism.
Implied but not publicized is that the Russian military and mercenaries would come into member countries to guard the nukes, monopolize defense, and effectively control each member nation.
Putin has entangled Russia in an unnecessary war of aggression on neighboring Ukraine and has used Lukashenko to cry for help as Putin’s self-imposed disaster careens toward catastrophe after his forces (1) destroyed the dam once insuring water supply to one of the most productive breadbaskets of the Eastern hemisphere, and (2) rigged a massive nuclear power plant in the same region with explosives, threatening to irradiate Ukraine’s hemispheric food supply center. What sane leader would sign onto that?
Neither Russian-managed Chernobyl nor a security state economy with an expanding nuclear arsenal worked very well for former Soviet states and their neighbors. And good faith security guarantees from Moscow? Ask Ukraine and Moldova about those.
This is why, asked for comment, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev referred to Kazakhstan’s economic treaty with Russia as quite enough, then said, “As for nuclear weapons, we do not need them because we have joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.”
The world saw the end of one dictatorial doomsday union. Does it need another?
Meanwhile free nations see record immigration from countries run by self-centered autocrats. That is testimony to the wisdom of crowds.
