Ukraine has demanded an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council over Vladimir Putin’s plans to place tactical atomic weapons in Belarus, saying Minsk was being used “as a nuclear hostage”.
In one of his most pronounced nuclear threats since the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian president said construction of facilities for the weapons would be completed by 1 July.
He said Russia was following the lead of the United States, which has nuclear weapons based in Europe and Turkey, and Britain, which is providing Ukraine with armour-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium.
But Nato on Sunday criticised his “dangerous and irresponsible” rhetoric.
“Russia’s reference to Nato’s nuclear sharing is totally misleading,” a spokesperson said. “Nato allies act with full respect of their international commitments. Russia has consistently broken its arms control commitments, most recently suspending its participation in the New START Treaty.”
Oleksiy Danilov, a top security adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, said Mr Putin’s plan would also destabilise Belarus. “The Kremlin took Belarus as a nuclear hostage,” he said.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry called for an extraordinary meeting of the UN Security Council and asked the international community to “take decisive measures” to prevent Russia’s use of nuclear weapons.
But analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said the risk of escalation to nuclear war “remains extremely low”.
Mr Putin argued that Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko wants nuclear weapons in his country again to counter Nato.
Belarus shares borders with three Nato members – Latvia, Lithuania and Poland – and Russia used Belarusian territory as a staging ground to send troops into Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
Tactical nuclear weapons are intended for use on the battlefield and have a short range and a low yield compared with much more powerful nuclear warheads fitted to long-range missiles.
Russia has stored its tactical nuclear weapons at dedicated depots on its own territory; moving part of the arsenal to Belarus would up the ante in the Ukrainian conflict by placing them closer to Russian aircraft and missiles already stationed there.
The US said it would “monitor the implications” of Putin’s announcement. Germany called it a “further attempt at nuclear intimidation”.
Further heightening tensions, an explosion deep inside Russia wounded three people on Sunday. Russian authorities blamed a Ukrainian drone for the blast, which damaged residential buildings in a town some 177km (110 miles) south of Moscow.
Russian state-run news agency Tass reported that authorities had identified the drone as a Ukrainian Tu-141, a Soviet-era device reintroduced in Ukraine in 2014. Similar drone attacks have been common during the war, although Ukraine hardly ever acknowledges responsibility.
On the battlefield, Russian forces hit military targets in Kharkiv, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherso, causing significant Ukrainian casualties.
