FILE PHOTO: Russian President Putin meets with Belarusian President Lukashenko in Moscow
Belarus' Lukashenko says Russian nuclear shift was overdue, may prompt West to cool down
Reuters: Changes announced by Russia to its nuclear weapons policy were long overdue and will probably "cool the ardour" of its Western enemies, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko said in an interview released on Sunday.
Lukashenko, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, said "hotheads" in the West had already heard the nuclear signals being sent by Moscow even before the Kremlin leader announced the changes last month.
Putin said on Sept. 25 that Russia was extending the list of scenarios that could prompt it to consider launching a nuclear weapon, including if it had reliable information about a massive cross-border attack against it involving aircraft, missiles or drones. He said Moscow would consider any assault on it supported by a nuclear power to be a joint attack.
The announcement was the Kremlin's answer to deliberations in the United States and Britain about whether or not to give Ukraine permission to fire Western-supplied long-range conventional missiles to hit targets deep inside Russia.
"This doctrine should have been renewed long ago," said Lukashenko, who last year agreed with Putin on the stationing of Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.
He told a Russian TV reporter that Western missiles would "already be bombing us, especially Russia" if the West had not paid attention to Putin's earlier nuclear signals. But the change to the nuclear doctrine "probably cools their ardour", he added.
Ukraine has accused Russia of nuclear blackmail and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has urged the West to ignore Putin's "red lines". Moscow says its warnings are for real, and Putin has said the U.S. and its allies will be fighting Russia directly if they give the green light for Kyiv to fire U.S. ATACMS and British Storm Shadow missiles deep into Russia.
In World
-
Explosions and gunfire in Iran killed at least two Afghans earlier this month, the Taliban authorities in Afghanistan said on Thursday.
-
Огромный штраф, наложенный российским судом на Google, привлек внимание Кремля, который надеется, что Google, в свою очередь, обратит на это внимание.
-
Germany ordered the closure of all three Iranian Consulates in the country on Thursday in response to the execution of Iranian German prisoner Jamshid Sharmahd, who lived in the United States and was kidnapped in Dubai in 2020 by Iranian security forces.
-
SpaceX just launched some reportedly "next-gen" spy satellites on behalf of the US government — and it sounds like certain officials at the Pentagon are anxious about it.
Leave a review