The former US national security adviser, John Bolton, warned on Monday that the Russian president Vladimir Putin he “may not be bluffing” about transferring tactical nuclear weapons to neighboring Belarus, but he doesn’t need that country.

“Well, I think he was bluffing when he brandished the “nuclear sword” in the past. He might not be bluffing here, in the sense that he really might to routinely transfer nuclear weapons to Belarus; which is its own separate problem,” Bolton emphasized in an interview with CNN. But Bolton clarified that even if Putin did that, it wouldn’t make “a lot of difference” in his view, “because we know about extensive nuclear supplies, missiles, cruise missiles, drones and warheads, in Kaliningrad, an enclave, a piece of Russia separated (territorially) from Russia by Lithuania and Poland’.

“It’s a place that for a long time has basically been a Russian military area dating back to the time of the Soviet Union,” he said. “So the capabilities that Russia already has in the Kaliningrad enclave are those that they could be more threatening. I don’t think the idea of ​​transferring some tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus changes that balance,” he added.

Kaliningrad, before the Second World War, was the Königsberg of East Prussia, i.e. part of the German territory, which after the war came under the ownership of the USSR.

Russia has made a deal with Belarus over the development of tactical nuclear weapons on its territory, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday, according to Russian news agency TASS.

Such a move would not violate agreements on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, the Russian leader said, adding that the United States had also placed nuclear weapons on the territory of its European allies.

Russia has already delivered the Iskander missile system capable of carrying nuclear weapons to Belarus, Putin said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 TV channel. According to Putin, his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko has long raised the issue of deploying Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, which have not existed in the country since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

However, US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the Biden administration “has seen no movement of tactical nuclear weapons or something like that after that announcement, and we certainly haven’t seen any indication that Mr. Putin has made any decision to use weapons of mass destruction, let alone nuclear weapons, inside Ukraine.”