“We have missiles and bombs that we received from Russia,” Mr Lukashenko said in an interview with Russian state television channel Rossiya-1 and posted on the Telegram channel of state news agency Belta Belarus.
President Alexander Lukashenko addresses the press in Minsk, Belarus on June 14, 2023. Photo: Belarusian Presidential Press Service
“These bombs were three times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” he said, speaking on a street with military vehicles parked nearby and some kind of military storage facility visible in the background.
Last Friday, President Vladimir Putin said Russia would begin deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus once special storage facilities to house them were ready.
The Russian leader said in March that he had agreed to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, noting that the United States had deployed such weapons in a number of European countries over the past several decades.
Mr Lukashenko told Russian state television in the interview, released late on Tuesday, that his country had many nuclear storage facilities left over from the Soviet era and had restored five or six of them.
The Belarusian president added that the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons is intended to protect the country. “We are always a target… So far no one has attacked a nuclear state, a nuclear-armed state,” he said.
Huy Hoang (according to Belta, Rossiya-1, Reuters)
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