MOSCOW, May 25. /TASS/. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said on Thursday that his much-publicized handshake with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on May 25 was, in fact, a show of gratitude for the latter's decision to place tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian soil.
On Wednesday, when Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev was addressing a plenary meeting of the second Eurasian Economic Forum, he said the integration between Moscow and Minsk was so close that the two countries even split nuclear weapons, while Lukashenko and Putin were caught on camera shaking hands all of a sudden. Reporter Pavel Zarubin asked Lukashenko what the two leaders were talking about at that moment.
"When we discussed nuclear weapons - to be honest, I could not hear well because of the acoustics, - Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] told me that a decision has been made to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus; he told me that, and I said, `Thank you’," the Belarusian leader explained in a video posted on Zarubin’s Telegram channel. "That was what we discussed, nothing more," he added.
Lukashenko announced earlier that he and Putin had been discussing returning nuclear weapons to Belarus which were taken out of the country under no-sanctions guarantees from the West, although that Western pledge was never delivered. Against the backdrop of the latest challenges, he said, the republic would like to safeguard itself.
On March 25, Putin announced that, at Minsk’s request, Moscow would deploy its tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, similar to what the United States has long been doing on the territory of its allies. As the Russian leader indicated, the construction of storage facilities for tactical nuclear weapons will be completed in Belarus by July 1.
Moscow has already provided Minsk with Iskander tactical missile systems capable of carrying nuclear weapons and has helped Minsk to re-equip its military aircraft to carry specialized weapons. Apart from that, Belarusian missile crews and pilots have undergone training in Russia
Earlier on Thursday, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and his Belarusian counterpart, Viktor Khrenin, signed documents in Minsk to determine the procedure for keeping Russian nuclear weapons in a special storage facility in Belarus.