President Vladimir Putin has said Saturday that Russia will station tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus.
President Putin said the move would not violate nuclear non-proliferation agreements and compared it to the US stationing its weapons in Europe, the Russian leader told state broadcaster Russia 1.
‘Moscow would not be transferring control of its arms to Minsk,’ he added.
He said Moscow had already transferred an Iskander short-range missile system, a device which can be fitted with nuclear or conventional warheads, to Belarus.
During the interview, Putin said Russia had helped Belarus convert 10 aircraft to make them capable of carrying tactical nuclear warheads and would start training pilots to fly the re-configured planes early next month.
The US said it did not believe Russia was preparing to use the nuclear weapons after the announcement.
‘We have not seen any reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear posture,’ the US Defense Department said in a statement.
We remain committed to the collective defence of the Nato alliance.
‘Belarus shares a long border with Ukraine, and with Nato members Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
This will be the first time since the mid-1990s that Moscow will have based nuclear arms outside the country.
The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 meant weapons became based in four newly-independent states – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan – with the transfer of all warheads to Russia completed in 1996.
The Belarusian regime is a firm Kremlin ally and supporter of the invasion of Ukraine.
President Putin told Russian state television on Saturday that Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko had long raised the issue of stationing tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.
‘There is nothing unusual here either,’ he said.
‘Firstly, the United States has been doing this for decades. They have long deployed their tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of their allied countries.’
Russia will start training crews to operate the weapons from next week. The construction of a storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus will be completed by 1 July, President Putin added.
He did not specify when the weapons themselves would be sent.
The announcement to station weapons in Belarus comes only days after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow, during which Russia and China issued a joint statement saying ‘all nuclear powers must not deploy their nuclear weapons beyond their national territories, and they must withdraw all nuclear weapons deployed abroad.’
Reacting to the new move from Russia, a top security adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Sunday said that Russia’s plans are a ‘step towards internal destabilisation’ of Belarus and predicted anti-Russian sentiment in the country would grow.
‘The Kremlin took Belarus as a nuclear hostage,’ Oleksiy Danilov wrote on Twitter.
Also, an exiled Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya said that Russia’s deployment of tactical nuclear weapons ‘grossly contradicts the will of the Belarusian people’.
