The heads of the defense departments of Russia and Belarus, Sergei Shoigu and Viktor Khrenin, signed documents defining the conditions for keeping Russian non-strategic nuclear weapons in a special storage facility on Belarusian territory. This was announced on May 25 by the press service of the Russian Defense Ministry.
“Russia does not transfer nuclear weapons to the Republic of Belarus: control over them and the decision on their use remains with the Russian side,” Shoigu said during the meeting. “The deployment of non-strategic nuclear weapons is an effective response to the aggressive policy of countries that are unfriendly to us,” Khrenin said in turn. According to him, Western countries are exerting "unprecedented pressure" on both Moscow and Minsk.
Pavel Podvig, a researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Studies, told The Insider that the signing of an agreement on the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus looks like a purely political step.
“It cannot be ruled out that everything will be limited to this and the real transfer of charges to the territory of Belarus may not occur. There are many reasons for this, including the resistance of the 12th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, where responsible and conservative people [work]. I hope for bureaucratic and institutional resistance to the movement of warheads, because [then] it is necessary to move troops and so on. This is a complex and long process. I hope that everything will be limited to a political statement and that there will be nothing more than this.
It is not yet known where the storage facility will be created, although the Russian president has promised that it will be opened by July. In my opinion, it is difficult to create a full-fledged nuclear weapons storage facility from scratch, which will be provided with all the necessary security and maintenance systems, by July. Probably, they will simply choose some object that is already under control and declare that there is a possibility of deploying nuclear weapons. The weapon itself may not appear there, but there will simply be a storage facility with the possibility of placing it, and if a decision is made, the charges will be transported there.
There were many vaults in Belarus during the Soviet era, but we can be sure that none of them have survived in their original form. Maybe some concrete walls or doors were left there, but in any case, it will be necessary to create [the storage] practically from scratch.
There is nothing good in the fact that another country appears on the territory of which there are nuclear weapons. But from a practical and military point of view, this does not change anything. There is no significant difference from which territory the bomber will take off, from Russia or from Belarus.”
In March, Vladimir Putin announced the construction of a storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Russia has "hundreds of thousands" of depleted uranium shells, he said.