(TheRedAlertNews.com) – Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin has unveiled a plan to station part of Moscow’s tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of its ally Belarus, a move deemed to escalate tensions with the West amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Belarus, the size of Kansas and with the same population as New Jersey, has been in a murky “Union State” alliance with Russia since the late 1990s.
The landlocked country borders Russia to the east, Ukraine to the South, and US allies and NATO members Poland and Lithuania to the west and north.
Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power for 28 years – six more than Putin – has collaborated with Moscow. Since February 2022, he has allowed Putin to use Belarus’s territory to wage war on pro-Western Ukraine.
In his comments over the weekend, the Russian leader continued to issue thinly veiled threats against Western nations.
He vowed to deploy depleted uranium munitions if Ukraine received such tank shells from Britain – although Russian opposition exiles and Ukrainian experts claim that Moscow has already been using such ammunition.
“There is nothing unusual here either: the United States has been doing this for decades. They have long placed their tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of their allies,” Putin declared, as cited by AFP and Breitbart News.
He added he had spoken and had an agreement with fellow post-Soviet leader Alexander Lukashenko about the deployment of tactical nukes on Belarusian soil.
The Russian president dwelled on the fact that his country had enormous amounts of depleted uranium shells.
“Russia, of course, has what it needs to answer. Without exaggeration, we have hundreds of thousands of such shells. We have not used them yet,” Putin stated in an interview on Russian television.
Putin’s decision to station tactical nukes in Belarus, which would allow him to attack US allies such as Poland from the territory of another country to avoid direct retaliation against Russia, comes after last month, the Moscow leader suspended his country’s role in the New START treaty.
New START was the last remaining arms control treaty between the United States and Russia.
Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary-General of the US-led NATO alliance, blasted Russia for ending its participation in the treaty.
He declared that Putin’s move had ended the post-Cold War arms control architecture.
In an earlier step to that end, in August 2022, Moscow ended American inspections of its military facilities required under the New START treaty.
US government officials have warned that Putin’s Russia could resort to using nuclear weapons if it got beaten badly on the battlefield in Ukraine and that Moscow could come up with a fake story as a justification for its actions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Saturday he would deploy tactical nuclear weapons in neighbour and ally Belarus. https://t.co/PSSsmi4h55
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) March 27, 2023
