"All of Vlad's forces and all of Vlad's men, are out to put Humpty together again." (5 Viewers)

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I think it better to simply put a couple of boomers east of Norway with orders to be occasionally detectable. They could cover anything from Minsk to Moscow and beyond, and the message would be clear.
I bet the arrival of several B-2 bombers into key locations in the region would also send a message.
 
Agreed, this move is not to make them a launch platform, but to make them hostages.
A tac nuke launch from Belarus into Ukraine would initiate some complex diplomatic and strategic issues...
Ukraine isn't NATO. Belarus isn't Warsaw Pact / USSR. It is, even if only nominally, an independent state.

Putin is keeping his nuclear option on his doorstep, but outside the homestead. Belarus is clearly expendable. Its a highly destabilising move, so he's playing his brinksman / unpredictability card again.

What If question: Ukraine was the home of the USSR military industrial manufacturing industry until its breakup. It also has multiple nuclear power stations and 15 reactors. It is currently in a war of existential survival against what is in reality a dictatorship in which opponents serve long prison sentences, get cancer, fall out of windows, eat pollonium sandwiches or get poisoned by Russian chemical weponry completely cooincidentally in the same week proven agents take a sabbatical to visit the Cathedral in their city.

Could they have cobbled together enough 235 to make a couple of simple 'gun type' nuclear weapons as a last resort, even if they are to be merely announced as 'a fleet in being'?

Israel, South Africa, Pakistan and India and North Korea all managed it....
 
A tac nuke launch from Belarus into Ukraine would initiate some complex diplomatic and strategic issues...
Ukraine isn't NATO. Belarus isn't Warsaw Pact / USSR. It is, even if only nominally, an independent state.

Putin is keeping his nuclear option on his doorstep, but outside the homestead. Belarus is clearly expendable. Its a highly destabilising move, so he's playing his brinksman / unpredictability card again.

What If question: Ukraine was the home of the USSR military industrial manufacturing industry until its breakup. It also has multiple nuclear power stations and 15 reactors. It is currently in a war of existential survival against what is in reality a dictatorship in which opponents serve long prison sentences, get cancer, fall out of windows, eat pollonium sandwiches or get poisoned by Russian chemical weponry completely cooincidentally in the same week proven agents take a sabbatical to visit the Cathedral in their city.

Could they have cobbled together enough 235 to make a couple of simple 'gun type' nuclear weapons as a last resort, even if they are to be merely announced as 'a fleet in being'?

Israel, South Africa, Pakistan and India and North Korea all managed it....

Last question first, of course they could. Making a fission bomb is in essence a matter of removing control-rods and increasing fission masses while keeping them separate until the fusing sends them crashing together.

Putin doesn't really have a nuclear option, though. Of course he could, and in the meantime bring down nuclear rain upon the legacy he is striving so hard to cement. But he won't, because the first casualty will be his dream of being the Russian savior.

I stand by my point, that this is offering up a foreign population as hostages in a brinksmanship game he will not be willing to finish. Best answer, to my mind, is publish satellite photos of nukes in place and saying that if launches occur from here launches will also land there. This move of Putin's offers NATO a wedge to separate Lukashenko from Putin without firing a shot.
 
The destination for the russian T-90 stranded in a gas station seems to be an US Army test center, coming from the polish port of Gdydina.

Why not bring it to the USA by air? Safer, quickier and more discreet. Sure a C-17 could haul a T-90:

 
Into the complex world of diplomacy and domestic politics: both Hungary and Poland (see EU says unilateral trade action unacceptable after Poland, Hungary ban Ukraine grain, food imports and Hungary Joins Poland in Banning Grain Imports From Ukraine) have banned food imports from Ukraine, with Poland also banning transit of Ukrainian foodstuffs.

[Emphasis added]

Don't you know better by now? Or is this a deliberate attempt to kill this thread?
 
The T-90 is just one piece of Russian equipment brought to the US recently.
I remember many decades ago a news story of a T-55 on a trailer being abandoned in a Chicago neighborhood. After a few weeks, the citizen complaints brought an inspection which found the T-55 was intact with ammunition on board. It seems the freight company went bankrupt and the driver parked his load, took his truck and left. Those of you with your majic device may be able to find if I remember correctly.
 
I remember many decades ago a news story of a T-55 on a trailer being abandoned in a Chicago neighborhood. After a few weeks, the citizen complaints brought an inspection which found the T-55 was intact with ammunition on board. It seems the freight company went bankrupt and the driver parked his load, took his truck and left. Those of you with your majic device may be able to find if I remember correctly.
Abandoned in Chicago? I'm surprised the bogey wheels weren't stolen.
 

The report finds that sanctions create shortages of higher-end foreign components and force Moscow to substitute them with lower-quality alternatives. For now, Moscow's efforts at state-backed import substitution remain largely unsuccessful. This ultimately impacts Russia's ability to manufacture, sustain, and deliver advanced weapons and technology to the battlefield in Ukraine. Therefore, while the quality of the military equipment used by the Ukrainian army continues to improve thanks to the Western aid, the quality of Russia's weapons continues to degrade.
 

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