Belarus has started receiving Russian tactical nuclear weapons, Minsk leader Oleksandr Lukashenko said, adding that some of them are three times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped by the US on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Reuters reports.
Moscow’s deployment is Moscow’s first move toward such warheads, a shorter-range, lower-power nuclear weapon that could be used on a battlefield outside of Russia after the collapse of the USSR.
This step is closely watched by the United States and its allies, as well as China, which has repeatedly warned against the use of nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine.
“We have missiles and bombs that we received from Russia,” Lukashenko said in an interview with the Russian TV channel “Russia-1”, published on the Telegram channel of the Belarusian state news agency Belta.
“The bombs are three times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” the Minsk leader said.
Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said on Tuesday that nuclear weapons would be physically deployed on Belarus “within days” and that it had the means to deploy longer-range missiles if needed.
On Friday, Putin said that Russia, which will retain control of tactical nuclear weapons, will begin placing them in Belarus after special storage facilities are prepared.
In March, the Kremlin leader announced that he had agreed to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, recalling the US deployment of such weapons in several European countries over several decades.
The US criticized Putin’s decision but said it had no plans to change its position on strategic nuclear weapons and saw no signs that Russia was preparing to use nuclear weapons.
In the same interview with Russian state television, Lukashenko said that his country has numerous nuclear weapons storage facilities left over from the Soviet era, and that he has restored five or six of them.
Lukashenko, who has allowed his country to be used by Russian troops attacking Ukraine as part of what Moscow calls its “special military operation,” said the deployment of nuclear weapons would act as a deterrent against potential aggressors.
Belarus borders three NATO member states: Lithuania, Latvia and Poland.
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Source: Hot News
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