Experts are examining potential sites within Belarus for a storage facility intended to house Russian tactical nuclear weapons, a development reported by Kommersant with input from Jeffrey Lewis, who directs the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in the United States.
Previously, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, asserted that the project to establish a storage site for nuclear warheads on Belarusian soil would reach completion by July 1 of the current year.
Lewis, recognized for his work on open-source intelligence and satellite imagery, noted that his team has begun research into the matter. He emphasized that identifying exact locations and confirming whether construction has begun remains challenging at this stage.
The director of the center reminded readers that Soviet-era nuclear weapons were previously stored in Belarus until 1996, suggesting that the current activity could involve either constructing a fresh facility or upgrading an existing one.
Pavel Podvig, who leads the Russian Strategic Nuclear Weapons project and serves as a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, argued that it is unlikely the legacy storage sites would be kept ready for rapid use more quickly than a new facility could be built. He pointed to prior modernization efforts conducted by Russia near Kaliningrad and Tver as examples cited by researchers analyzing satellite images. This pattern was similarly observed in the current discussions.
Podvig stressed that building a new storage facility within a three-month window is highly improbable, and that maintaining such a site through the construction phase would pose significant difficulties. He added that Moscow’s public stance would at least convey a political message to the West, though it is not guaranteed that tactical nuclear weapons will be deployed in Belarus promptly.
A former Kremlin spokesman for the president, Dmitry Peskov, argued that Western reactions to plans for deploying tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory would not alter Moscow’s strategic intent.