‘After all, NATO is expanding toward Russia’s borders, it is not Russia who is approaching the alliance’s borders with its military infrastructure, and this is worrying and affects our security, he said.

Peskov added that this concern causes Russia to take measures for its defense and to try to compensate the entire security architecture on the continent, and this has happened every time NATO approaches its borders.

The senior official thus commented about the statements on nuclear weapons deployment in Belarus made by the Secretary General of the Atlantic Alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, who described as ’empty words’ the promises of Russia and China not to deploy nuclear weapons outside their borders.

On March 25, President Vladimir Putin announced that Moscow and Minsk had agreed to deploy Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus without violating international commitments.

According to the Russian leader, this is not a transfer of nuclear weapons to Belarus, but their placement, and indicated, in allusion to a common practice in the NATO context, that the United States has been doing the same thing in several countries for decades. The president added that the construction of a tactical nuclear weapons depot in Belarus will be completed on July 1.

jrr/jav/mem/gfa.