Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said his country began receiving Russian tactical nuclear weapons, some of which he said were three times more powerful than the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The deployment is Moscow’s first move of such warheads, less powerful, shorter-range nuclear weapons that could be used on the battlefield, outside of Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
“We have missiles and bombs that we have received from Russia,” Lukashenko said in an interview with Russian state television channel Rossiya-1 that was published on the Telegram channel of the Belarusian state news agency Belta.
“The bombs are three times more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” he said, speaking on a road in a forest clearing with military vehicles parked nearby and some sort of military storage facility visible in the background.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that Russia, which will retain control of tactical nuclear weapons, will start deploying them in Belarus after special storage facilities are prepared to house them.
The Russian leader announced in March that he had agreed to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, pointing to the deployment of such weapons by the United States in a number of European countries over many decades.
The United States has criticized Putin’s decision, but has said it has no intention of changing its own stance on strategic nuclear weapons and has seen no sign that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon.
However, the Russian move is being closely watched by the United States and its allies, as well as by China, which has repeatedly warned against the use of nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine.
Lukashenko, a close Putin ally, told Russian state television in the interview, which was published late Tuesday, that his country had numerous Soviet-era nuclear storage facilities and had restored five or six of them.
He downplayed the idea that Russian control of the weapons was an impediment to using them quickly if he felt such a move was necessary, saying he and Putin could communicate by phone «at any time.»
Earlier on Tuesday, he had said separately that Russian tactical nuclear weapons would be physically deployed on the territory of Belarus «in several days» and that it also had the facilities to house longer-range missiles if ever needed.
Lukashenko, who has allowed his country to be used by Russian forces attacking Ukraine as part of what Moscow calls its «special military operation», says the nuclear deployment will act as a deterrent against would-be aggressors.
Belarus borders three NATO member countries: Lithuania, Latvia and Poland.
The 68-year-old former Soviet collective farm boss, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, making him Europe’s longest-serving leader, said he not only asked Putin for weapons, but «demanded» them.
“We have always been a target,” Lukashenko said. «They (the West) have wanted to tear us apart since 2020. No one has fought against a nuclear country so far, a country that has nuclear weapons.»
Lukashenko has repeatedly accused the West of trying to overthrow him after mass protests against his government broke out in 2020 in the wake of a presidential election that the opposition said it had fraudulently won. Lukashenko said he had won fairly, while cracking down on his opponents.