New Delhi: Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the exiled Belarusian opposition leader, has expressed concern about the potential danger of the transfer of nuclear weapons from Russia to "the hands of a crazy dictator" in Belarus under the control of President Alexander Lukashenko, reported BBC.
Lukashenko had confirmed the arrival of the first "missiles and bombs" in Belarus, marking the first deployment of tactical nuclear weapons outside of Russia since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
During an interview with the BBC in Warsaw, Tikhanovskaya criticized Western politicians for "staying silent" regarding this development and emphasized the need for international attention and action in response to the situation.
"We have missiles and bombs that we have received from Russia," Lukashenko said in an interview with the Rossiya-1 Russian state TV channel which was posted on the Belarusian Belta state news agency's Telegram channel.
Lukashenko is seen as Russia's key ally, with Belarus serving as a launchpad for President Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Lukashenko said that he had not simply asked Russian President Vladimir Putin for the nuclear weapons. "I demanded them back," he said, claiming that he needed them for protection from external aggression.
Belarus, like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, gave up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990s in return for security guarantees from post-Soviet Russia and the West. That makes this a significant reversal, although there is as yet no proof that the Russian weapons have been delivered.
The Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced in March he had agreed to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, pointing to the US deployment of such weapons in a host of European countries over many decades.
"I am not planning to fight the US… tactical weapons are fine," Lukashenko told BBC. "And the Iskander [rocket] travels 500 kilometres (310 miles) or more."
"This deployment creates no new threat to Nato countries, so they don't take it seriously," Tikhanovskaya argued, believing that Western countries see no difference between a missile fired from Russia or from Belarus.
Russia already has nuclear weapons in its western-most Kaliningrad region, putting Poland and the Baltic states well within range.
"But Belarus is our country and we don't want nuclear weapons," Tikhanovskaya said. "This is like the last step to keeping our independence. And they [in the West] are staying silent about that."
Lukashenko has repeatedly accused the West of trying to topple him after mass protests against his rule erupted in 2020 in the wake of a presidential election the opposition said he had fraudulently won. Lukashenko said he had won fairly, while conducting a sweeping crackdown on his opponents.