(Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin did not discuss the placement in Belarus of Russian strategic nuclear weapons – meaning intercontinental ballistic missiles – in talks with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in Moscow on Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to the Interfax agency.
Putin last month announced that Russia would station shorter-range, so-called tactical nuclear weapons on its neighbour’s territory. Moscow says this move was forced upon it by the expansion of the NATO military alliance towards Russia’s borders.
It was the first time Russia had said it would station nuclear weapons on the territory of another country since the end of the Cold War three decades ago, and appeared to raise the stakes, at least symbolically, in an intensifying standoff with the West over the war in Ukraine.
Last week, Lukashenko said that Russia could, if the need arose, put intercontinental nuclear missiles there too, notably if the West was threatening to destroy Belarus. He offered no evidence of such a threat, however.
Putin and Lukashenko were holding two days of talks in Moscow in the framework of the Union State, a borderless union and alliance between the two former Soviet republics.
Russia used the territory of Belarus as a launchpad for its invasion of their common neighbour Ukraine in February last year, and since then their military cooperation has intensified, with joint training exercises on Belarusian soil.
Lukashenko has, however, insisted that Belarus is not a party to the war, and has no intention of becoming one.
There was no mention of the war in Ukraine in Putin and Lukashenko’s public statements at the summit.
Russia calls the war a “special military operation”, and says it was forced to act in order, among other things, to avert a Western threat to use Ukraine to threaten Russia’s security.
Kyiv and the West say this is a baseless pretext for a war of conquest, and the West responded by imposing a wide range of economic sanctions on Russia and giving Ukraine weaponry to help it repel Russia’s forces.
(Writing by Kevin Liffey; editing by Mark Heinrich)