Putin says tactical nuclear weapons will be deployed in Belarus next month

Russia will start deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus after special storage facilities are ready on July 7 and 8, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday, the first international movement of warheads through Moscow since the fall of Soviet Union.

Putin announced in March that he had agreed to deploy such weapons in Belarus, pointing to the United States’ deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in several European countries over many decades.

“Everything is going according to plan,” Putin told Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, discussing the planned nuclear deployment over a meal at the Russian leader’s summer retreat in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

“The preparation of the relevant facilities ends on July 7 and 8, and we will immediately start activities related to the positioning of appropriate types of weapons on their territory,” Putin said, according to a Kremlin transcript of his remarks.

More than 15 months after Europe’s biggest land war since World War Two, Putin says the US and its Western allies are supplying Ukraine with arms as part of an expanding proxy war aimed at bringing Russia to its knees.

Putin, 70, sees the war as a battle for Russia’s very survival in the face of what he says is an ever-expanding NATO. He warned the West that Moscow will not back down.

Putin’s nuclear move is being closely watched by the US and its NATO allies in Europe and by China, which has repeatedly warned against the use of nuclear weapons in the conflict.

The US has criticized Putin’s nuclear deployment but has said it has no intention of changing its stance on strategic nuclear weapons and has also seen no signs that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon.

The war in Ukraine has triggered what Moscow and Washington say is the deepest crisis in relations since the height of the Cold War, with key nuclear arms control treaties falling apart and both sides publicly denouncing the other.

Last September, Putin warned the West that he was not bluffing when he said that Russia would use “all available means to protect Russia and our people”.