The German government has dismissed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement that tactical nuclear weapons would be stationed in Belarus as “another attempt at nuclear intimidation”. The Foreign Office said that Belarus had made several international declarations to be free of nuclear weapons. Putin had announced that he would build a storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus by July 1 and train soldiers in how to use them. Russia already has nuclear-capable ballistic missiles of the type Belarus Iskander left and ten fighter jets converted so that they could use nuclear weapons, Putin said on state television on Saturday.
As early as June 2022, he had agreed to the stationing with the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. Lukashenko had held a referendum in February to scrap a constitutional clause that had barred nuclear weapons from entering the former Soviet republic. The weapons would remain under Russia’s control, Putin made clear, without giving details about the warheads or the timetable for their deployment.
The Foreign Office in Berlin dismissed Putin’s comparison to nuclear participation in NATO as “misleading”. He “cannot serve to justify the step announced by Russia”. The US has deployed just over a hundred tactical nuclear weapons in European NATO countries, including Germany. They are under the sole control of the US President, but would be used in the event of war by the air forces of the European allies on the orders of NATO’s supreme commander for Europe.
The federal government has decided to stick to this arrangement and the intended aging tornado-Bundeswehr fighter-bombers with new ones F-35-Replace US-made stealth jets. In polls last summer, for the first time in decades, a majority supported keeping US weapons in Germany.
Putin argued that Russia was only doing what NATO had been doing “for decades” and was not violating its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United States informed the Soviet Union about nuclear sharing before the NPT was signed. Russia first protested in 2014, when the dispute over Moscow’s buildup of intermediate-range nuclear-capable weapons had already begun.
The USA reacted cautiously to the announcement from Moscow. The National Security Council in the White House said it was monitoring the impact of Putin’s announcement. “We see no reason to change our own strategic stance, or any indication that Russia is preparing to use nuclear weapons,” a spokeswoman said. The US monitors the central storage facilities for tactical nuclear weapons in Russia. Even without moving to Belarus, which borders the NATO states of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia and Ukraine, Moscow is able to reach any place in Europe with nuclear weapons from its territory.