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Russia has begun transferring its tactical nuclear warheads to Belarus Thursday — just hours after the two allied nations signed an agreement formalizing the weapons’ deployment.
“It was necessary to prepare storage sites, and so on. We did all this. Therefore, the movement of nuclear weapons began,” Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said while attending a summit in Moscow, according to state news agency BelTA.
Under the Russia-Belarus deal, Kremlin will retain control of the tactical nuclear weapons, which are designed to obliterate enemy troops and equipment on the battlefield.
Lukashenko promised to keep the short-range warheads safe, saying: “Don’t worry about nuclear weapons. We are responsible for this. These are serious issues. Everything will be all right here.”
If the statement was Lukashenko’s attempt to allay Western concerns, it badly missed its mark.
The US strongly condemned the deployment of the tactical nukes, which State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller decried as “the latest example of irresponsible behavior that we have seen from Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine over a year ago.”
Despite Thursday’s developments, Miller said the US has seen no reason to adjust its nuclear posture “or any indications that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon.”
The move comes months after President Vladimir Putin unveiled his plan to transfer some of Russia’s short-range nuclear warheads to Belarus in an apparent warning to the West.
It was not immediately clear how many nuclear weapons would be staged in Belarus, which shares borders with three NATO member states: Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
