Russia has moved tactical nuclear weapons from its own borders into neighboring Belarus, several hundred miles closer to NATO territory, Western officials confirmed to Foreign Policy, as Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens a wider military showdown with the alliance over its continued support for Ukraine.
Russia has moved tactical nuclear weapons from its own borders into neighboring Belarus, several hundred miles closer to NATO territory, Western officials confirmed to Foreign Policy, as Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens a wider military showdown with the alliance over its continued support for Ukraine.
The move, which Putin first announced in June of last year, is likely aimed at ramping up pressure on NATO’s eastern flank. It follows years of nuclear saber-rattling intended to scare the West into paring back its support for Ukraine, now in its third year of war against Russia’s invasion, though top NATO officials insist that the move doesn’t drastically change the nature of Russia’s military threats to NATO.
Arvydas Anusauskas, Lithuania’s defense minister, was the first top official within the NATO alliance to confirm the news of the deployment. He warned that the risks of Western inaction were high, citing the lackluster response in the West to Russia moving more nuclear weapons to the Kaliningrad Peninsula, which is bounded by Poland and Lithuania on either side.
“We would like to see a harder response on that,” Anusauskas said. “If [the] Russians move nuclear weapons closer to us, we need to move as well.”
The nuclear question has hung over the heads of Western leaders ever since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. Top U.S. officials believed that Putin floated the possibility of using limited-yield tactical nuclear weapons in 2022 as he faced Ukrainian victories and significant battlefield setbacks before the conflict ground into a stalemate the following year.
Putin hasn’t taken that threat off the table, even in the conflict’s current state of relative deadlock. On Wednesday, ahead of Russia’s presidential elections this weekend, he doubled down.
“From a military-technical point of view, we are, of course, ready,” Putin told Rossiya-1 television and news agency RIA about the prospect of nuclear war with the West, when asked about threats to Russian sovereignty. Yet the Russian leader said he didn’t think that “everything is rushing head-on” toward a nuclear conflict. He also denied that he considered using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine in 2022, saying that “there was never such a need.”
Western intelligence officials and open-source sleuths have spent months tracking the status of the Russian deployment to Belarus, which Putin himself framed as a warning to the West. The movement of the weapons to Belarus marks one of the westernmost deployment points of the Kremlin’s atomic arsenal.
The movement of its nuclear weapons has clear political signaling, but some experts downplayed the military significance of the move—arguing that the weapons don’t pose a higher or lower threat to the alliance simply by being moved several hundred miles closer to NATO territory.
“The Russians can reach any place in NATO with nuclear missiles with what they have on their own territory,” said Rose Gottemoeller, a former top U.S. arms control envoy and deputy secretary-general of NATO. “It does not change the threat environment at all. So it is purely a political message.”
Others went further, arguing that publicly responding to the movement of nuclear weapons in Belarus simply plays into Russia’s hands.
“What difference does it make, really?” Hanno Pevkur, Estonia’s defense minister, told Foreign Policy. “So this is why every discussion about ‘Jesus, we have a nuclear weapon in Belarus, look what happens.’ Come on. This is just a Russian plan to take away focus from Ukraine and to have extra topics on our agenda. But in reality, it doesn’t make any difference [to] how Russia behaves.”
Still, Putin may play up the nuclear threat against NATO in the near future, particularly as Russia struggles to reconstitute its decimated military forces in Ukraine and it sees Western military support for Ukraine starting to waver. But on the flip side, the West’s resolve against nuclear blackmail is growing.
“[Putin] wants to make sure there’s an edge of worry” in current U.S. and European debates on whether to continue supporting Ukraine, Gottemoeller said. “For Ukraine and NATO allies in Europe, it’s not that they’re immune to these threats, but they don’t have the flash-bang shock value that they had in the first days of the invasion.”
A new unclassified assessment from the U.S. intelligence community released this week concluded that Russia likely does not want to engage in direct military conflict with NATO, but it determined that the Kremlin will rely more heavily on nuclear weapons to deter the United States and the alliance as it rebuilds its land forces.
The Kremlin is believed to have an inventory of nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads, including ones with much smaller yields, known as “tactical” or battlefield nuclear weapons, and nuclear warheads with much larger, so-called “strategic” yields.
As U.S.-Russia relations steadily deteriorated in recent years—and then cratered following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022—both sides have abandoned decades-old arms control treaties.
Washington and Moscow now only have one nuclear arms control treaty left, the New START treaty, which the Kremlin unilaterally suspended last year. The treaty caps the number of deployed warheads, missiles, bombers, and strategic nuclear missile launchers that both sides can have, but does not apply to new weapons that Russia has been building in recent years. (The Pentagon estimates Russia has 2,000 nonstrategic nuclear weapons that the treaty doesn’t cover.)
NATO officials insisted during the Munich Security Conference in February that Russia had done nothing since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago to force the alliance’s nuclear-armed countries—the United States, France, and the United Kingdom—to change their posture. The United States stages tactical nuclear weapons in at least six bases in Europe.
Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, seen by most Western officials as a Kremlin pawn, said in December that Russia had completed shipments of nuclear weapons to his country; however, until now, Western officials had not confirmed that the deployment was complete. Lukashenko had said the move was an effort to deter aggression from Poland, a NATO member on Belarus’s western border that spent an estimated 4 percent of GDP on defense in 2023. Though Belarus does not control the Russian warheads on its soil, the country has written a new military doctrine that stresses the use of tactical nuclear weapons to keep foreign attackers at bay.
Russia had already deployed Iskander missiles, which are nuclear capable, to Belarus by the end of 2022. Belarus has also become a home for about 2,500 to 4,000 members of the Russian paramilitary force known as the Wagner Group, according to Estonian intelligence estimates, many of them stationed at an old Soviet missile base about 50 miles from Minsk.
By October 2023, a senior Lithuanian diplomat and other Western officials indicated to Foreign Policy that Russia had built specific storage facilities and railway systems in Belarus to potentially house a nuclear arsenal. Russia had also begun training pilots in Belarus to use aircraft capable of deploying nuclear weapons.
Open-source analysts have focused on two particular sites in Belarus. In the town of Asipovichy, near a Russian base for Iskander missiles, officials have built a quadruple-layered security fence and garrison garages for potential launcher and warhead storage in the past year and a half, according to Hans Kristensen, the director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists.
In the northeast corner of Belarus, in the town of Prudok, Russia appears to have constructed a bunker and a large storage garage near a railway entrance. “I think what they’re doing instead is more that they’re practicing their contingency capabilities to put them in there if they need to,” Kristensen said.
The United States, the United Kingdom, and France are in the middle of multidecade nuclear modernization efforts. Among Germans, with some officials fearing that a second Trump administration in the United States might not come to Europe’s defense against a Russian invasion, there is talk of fielding their own nuclear weapons, or at least developing a fallback plan if U.S. help doesn’t arrive.
“We need a second insurance policy,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said at an event at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington in February. Sikorski stated during a briefing in Washington this week that Russia has found that “nuclear weapons are actually very hard to use,” owing to the military’s inability to fight in environments contaminated by nuclear fallout.
Even NATO—which has revamped its war plans for a possible Article 5-level war against Russia—is beginning to think about its role in helping speed up that process.
“It will cause other NATO nations to think about whether they need to have nuclear weapons on their soil,” said Philip Breedlove, a retired four-star U.S. Air Force general who was formerly the dual-hatted NATO supreme allied commander and the head of U.S. European Command. Breedlove said he had no independent knowledge of Russia staging nuclear weapons in Belarus.
Beyond Belarus, Russia is building up its nuclear arsenal, too. The Kremlin claims that it’s put liquid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles on combat duty. The Russians are also fielding new nuclear-powered cruise missile submarines. And they’ve launched hypersonic cruise missiles against Ukraine, though the Ukrainians have managed to shoot down the sound barrier-breaking weapons with U.S.-made Patriot air defenses.
Other top NATO leaders said strengthening the alliance’s nuclear and conventional deterrence is the only proper response to Putin’s saber-rattling.
“Putin has a great weakness,” Sikorski said. “He attacks only when he thinks he can get away with it. He shrinks when in the face of strength, willpower, and credible deterrence.”
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