Russia inks deal with Belarus on nuclear weapons storage

MOSCOW: Russia moved ahead on Thursday with a plan to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, signing a deal with its ally about the storage of the warheads at a special facility that should be finished in just over a month’s time.

President Vladimir Putin says the United States and its allies are fighting an escalating proxy war against Russia after the Kremlin chief sent troops into Ukraine in February last year.

The plan for the nuclear deployment, Moscow’s first outside Russia’s borders since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, was announced by Putin in an interview with state television on March 25.

“The collective West is essentially waging an undeclared war against our countries,” Putin’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, said at a meeting with his Belarusian counterpart in Minsk, according to Russia’s defence ministry. The West, Shoigu said, was doing all it could “to prolong and escalate the armed conflict in Ukraine.” He said the documents they were signing concerned the process for storing tactical nuclear weapons in a special facility in Belarus.

Putin has repeatedly warned that Russia, which has more nuclear weapons than any other country, will use all means to defend itself, and he has cast the Ukraine war as a battle for the survival of Russia against an aggressive West. The United States and its allies say they want Ukraine to defeat Russian forces on the battlefield but deny that they want to destroy Russia - and deny that the Ukraine war is in any way linked to post-Soviet enlargement of NATO.

It is still unclear exactly when the Russian tactical nuclear weapons will be deployed in Belarus, which has borders with three NATO members - Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Russia will remain in control of the weapons.

Tactical nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons used for specific tactical gains on the battlefield, and so are usually smaller in yield than the strategic nuclear weapons designed to destroy the biggest cities of the United States or Russia.

Russia has a huge numerical superiority over the United States and the NATO military alliance when it comes to tactical nuclear weapons: the United States believes Russia has around 2,000 such working tactical warheads.

The United States has around 200 such tactical nuclear weapons, half of which are at bases in Europe. These 12-ft B61 nuclear bombs, with different yields of 0.3 to 170 kilotons, are deployed at six air bases across Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belgium and the Netherlands.