Moscow
AP
–
President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Russia has reaffirmed its plans to launch production of its latest hypersonic missiles and deploy them to allies later this year.
Putin sat with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Valaam Island near St. Petersburg and said the military had already selected Belarusian deployment sites for ballistic missiles in the Oleshnik intermediate range.
“Preparation work is ongoing and we will probably do that by the end of the year,” Putin said, adding that Oleshnik and the first series of his system have been produced and entered military service.
Russia first used Oleshnik, the Russian word for “hazelnut tree,” against Ukraine in November when it launched experimental weapons at a Dnipro factory where it built missiles when it was part of the Soviet Union.
Putin praises Oreshnik’s capabilities, saying multiple warheads plunging into targets at speeds up to Mach 10 will be intercepted, and using some of them on one traditional strike could be as devastating as a nuclear attack.
He warned the West that it could be used against Ukrainian NATO allies, which allowed Moscow to attack with longer-range missiles within Russia.
The chief of the Russian missile forces declared that Oleshnik, who can carry a conventional or nuclear warhead, had the scope to reach all of Europe.
Medium-range missiles can fly between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (310 to 3,400 miles). Such weapons were banned under Soviet-era treaties that Washington and Moscow abandoned in 2019.
Last fall, Putin and Lukashenko signed a treaty ensuring Moscow’s security guarantee to Belarus, including the possibility of the use of Russian nuclear weapons to repel attacks. The agreement follows the revision of the Kremlin of the nuclear doctrine, which for the first time placed Belarus under the Russian nuclear umbrella amid tensions with the West over the Ukrainian conflict.
Having ruled Belarus by iron for over 30 years and relied on Kremlin subsidies and support, Lukashenko has allowed Russia to send troops to Ukraine in 2022 and use its own territory to host some of its tactical nuclear weapons. Russia has not made it clear that a number of such weapons have been deployed, but Lukashenko said in December there were dozens of them in their country.
The deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, with a 1,084-kilometer (673 miles) boundary with Ukraine, will allow Russian aircraft and missiles to reach potential targets easily and quickly if Moscow decides to use them. It also expands Russia’s ability to target several NATO allies in Eastern and Central Europe.
The improved nuclear doctrine Putin signed last fall officially lowered the threshold for the use of Russian nuclear weapons. The document states that Moscow can use nuclear weapons “in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction” against Russia and its allies, and that “aggression and Belarus can use “aggression” and “threatening sovereignty and/or territorial integrity” against Russia and Belarus “in the case of aggression.”
