In a move certain to stoke tensions in war-torn Ukraine and its Western allies, Russia will complete construction of a special storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus, according to remarks by Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.
Russia has already handed over to Belarus the Iskander complex, which can store nuclear weapons, Putin said in a Saturday interview on TV channel Rossiya-24.
According to Putin, his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko has long raised the issue of deploying Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, which have not been present there since the early 1990s, when the USSR fell.
“We agreed with Lukashenko that we would place tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus without violating the nonproliferation regime,” Russian news agency TASS quoted Putin as saying.
The US has long placed such weapons in a number of countries, so there is nothing unusual in Belarus’ request, Putin added.
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