MOSCOW, March 28. /TASS/. Moscow and Minsk have made all the necessary decisions to ensure the security of the Union State of Russia and Belarus and will strictly comply with them, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement on Monday.
"Unlike NATO, which is an alliance subordinate to the United States, we have the Union State and a joint military doctrine," she pointed out, commenting on Western countries’ concern about Russian-Belarusian cooperation in the nuclear field. "That said, it is about the measures to ensure security that the Union State takes on its territory. All the necessary decisions have been made and they will be strictly complied with," Zakharova stressed.
"It would be naive to expect that we will not take any military and technical countermeasures in this field after the West launched a total hybrid war against Russia and the US and NATO announced plans to inflict ‘a strategic defeat’ on us. We reserve the right to take the necessary additional steps to ensure the security of Russia and its allies," the diplomat pointed out.
"The inappropriate reaction of some Western capitals to decisions pertaining to our cooperation with Belarus in the military nuclear domain is certainly puzzling. It seems the concern that Western countries are expressing in this regard is targeted at an uninformed audience that is completely unaware that the West, [innocently posing] as the self-appointed [global] schoolmarm, has its own years-long record of carrying out exercises in this area," the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman noted.
"All of these years, Russia has been exercising maximum restraint. Based on the spirit of the efforts that we made in the 1990s to bring all nuclear weapons from the former Soviet countries back to Russia and convert them to a non-deployed status, we have consistently emphasized the need to withdraw all US nuclear weapons from overseas and stop involving non-nuclear countries in drills for their deployment. All of that has either been ignored or openly rejected," Zakharova said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Saturday that, at Minsk’s request, Moscow would deploy its tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, similar to what the United States had been doing for some time on the territories of its allies. Russia has already handed over the nuclear-capable Iskander missile system to Belarus. According to the Russian leader, a special storage facility for tactical nukes will be built in Belarus by July 1.