“This is an element of escalation,” Szymon Szynkowski vel Sęk, Poland's European Union Affairs minister, was quoted as saying by Reuters. “The reaction should be calm but firm. We cannot be intimidated by Russian propagandists.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday that he was planning to station tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus and that Minsk would have a storage facility for Russian nuclear weapons ready by July 1.
The move is one of the Russia's most conspicuous nuclear threats since the beginning of its aggression on Ukraine over a year ago.
Putin likened the decision to the United States stationing its weapons in Europe, while insisting that Russia would not violate its nuclear non-proliferation promises.
On Sunday, a top security adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Oleksiy Danilov, tweeted that Russia's plans were a "step towards internal destabilization" in Belarus and predicted anti-Russian sentiment in the country would grow.
(jh)
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