New hazards of war enclose Belarusian town with turbulent past

OSIPOVICHI, Belarus (Reuters) - A Belarusian town with a turbulent past may hold some haunting new secrets: an empty camp that mutinous Russian mercenaries have yet to use and perhaps even a storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons Russia says it has deployed in Belarus.

In a former military camp surrounded by fir and birch forest just north of Osipovichi, more than 300 large tents have been put up by the Belarusian army but Wagner mercenaries have yet to say if they want to use it.

Belarus invited foreign journalists to visit the empty camp beside the village of Tsel as part of an attempt to deflate reports that the camp had been prepared specially for Wagner as part of a deal to end its June 24 mutiny in Russia.

The camp, empty besides mosquitoes, raises questions about the fate of the deal President Vladimir Putin struck to defuse the biggest challenge to the Russian state since the failed 1991 hardline coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev.

President Alexander Lukashenko has offered Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin the use of camps including the one at Tsel, though he said on Thursday that Prigozhin and his fighters were still in Russia. It is unclear why.

No one from Wagner has yet visited the camp, said General-Major Leonid Kasinsky, an aide to the Belarusian defence ministry for ideological work.

"You journalists should not try to make a sensation out of nothing," Kasinsky told foreign reporters at the camp, about 90 km (56 miles) south of the capital Minsk and around 230 km (140 miles) north of the Ukrainian border.

"This is a summer camp created as part of a training exercise," said Kasinsky. "No one from Wagner has yet come here to inspect the camp."

Osipovichi has long swayed to the tides of European history. It was once part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and then the Russian empire, it hosted Bolshevik revolutionaries and was occupied by Nazi Germany before the Red Army took it back in World War Two.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS?
Amid today's Ukraine war, the biggest land war in Europe since 1945, the town is again being enclosed by the tentacles of distant tumult.

Just east of the town, nestled behind forest, lies a secret installation that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency believes was visited by a senior Russian officer as a potential upgrade to nuclear weapons storage, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

Its top nuclear researcher, Hans Kristensen, said in a research note that it had yet to find visual evidence conclusively indicating the presence of an active nuclear weapons facility on the territory of Belarus.