The inappropriate response by a number of Western capitals to the decisions to promote Russia-Belarus interaction in the military nuclear sphere cannot but cause astonishment.  It looks like the concern expressed by the Western countries in this context is intended for an uninformed audience that is unaware of the self-proclaimed Western mentors’ years-long exercises in that same sphere.

There are undeniable facts indicating that it is the NATO countries that first introduced the concept of the so-called joint military operations and continued to follow it for decades. The concept is centred on the deployment of US nuclear weapons in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Türkiye, whose military personnel has been learning to handle these nuclear weapons in a systematic and increasingly intensive way and to participate in operations drilling their use in combat.

Neither is it a secret that the United States is implementing a sweeping modernisation of its nuclear bombs and their delivery vehicles involved in these operations, something that puts this potential on a qualitatively new level. At the same time, the United States and NATO are making no secret of the fact that their relevant military programmes are directed against Russia.

It is also common knowledge that Washington has adjusted its military doctrine in recent years to lower nuclear employment thresholds with a focus on “limited scenarios.”

We note with concern the recent calls to store US nuclear air bombs in more European countries and bring the storage infrastructure closer to the borders of the Union State of Russia and Belarus. 

All these past years, Russia displayed maximum restraint. We have consistently pointed to the need to repatriate all US nuclear weapons and stop involving non-nuclear countries in nuclear weapons employment drills, which is done in the spirit of our efforts to withdraw all nuclear weapons from the countries of the former USSR to Russia in the 1990’s and convert them to the non-deployed status. All of this was either disregarded or rejected.

It would be naïve to go on expecting that we will not take any military-technical countermeasures in this area in a situation where the West has unleashed a total hybrid war against Russia, with the US and NATO announcing their intention to inflict a “strategic defeat” on our country. We reserved and still reserve the right to take the necessary additional steps to ensure the security of Russia and its allies.

This task will continue to be addressed in the future. Unlike NATO, a US-dominated conglomerate of countries, we have the Union State of Russia and Belarus, which officially possesses a common military doctrine.  Therefore, the case in point is the Union State taking security measures in its own common national territory. All the necessary decisions to this effect have been approved and they will be meticulously implemented.