Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, announced on Friday that when the requisite specialized storage facilities in the formerly Soviet country are finished early next month, Moscow will begin deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.
Several months have passed since Putin originally announced plans to relocate tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus in March, citing American deployment of such weapons at NATO facilities in numerous European nations over a long period of time.
Alexander Lukashenko, the long-time dictator of Belarus, recently referred to the development as a rare opportunity for Minsk and Moscow to come together. In the 1990s, Belarus gave over its nuclear weapons to Russia in exchange for security assurances, along with Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
At his Bocharov Ruchey resort in Sochi, on Russia's Black Sea coast, Lukashenko met with Putin. "Everything is proceeding as planned," Putin said in televised remarks.
“Preparations of the relevant facilities will be completed on July 7 or 8, and we will immediately begin the activities related to the deployment of the corresponding types of weapons on your territory,” he added, according to a Kremlin transcript of his remarks.
If everything goes according to plan, this will be the first deployment of Russian tactical nuclear weapons outside of Russia since the Soviet Union's collapse in the 1990s.
Tactical nuclear weapons are designed to deliver a nuclear weapon's destructive potential in a relatively constrained battlefield environment. The yield of these weapons is often lower than that of the strategic nuclear bombs developed during the Cold War that could wipe out entire cities.
After an election in 2020 that kept him in power but was widely perceived at home and abroad as being rigged, Lukashenko, a steadfast ally of Putin who has been in power for almost three decades, has relied on Moscow's political and economic support to survive months of protests, mass arrests, and Western sanctions.
The Union State of Russia and Belarus, a supranational agreement between the two former Soviet republics that was signed in 1999 with the intention of enhancing economic and defense ties between the two neighbors, was promised tactical nuclear weapons by Lukashenko last month to any other nation that wished to join.
throughout an interview on Kremlin state television on May 28, he remarked, "It is very simple: join in the Union State of Belarus and Russia," adding, "There will be nuclear weapons for everyone." Lukashenko emphasized throughout the interview that it was his own viewpoint—not necessarily Putin's.
