President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that Russia could deploy its new Oreshny intermediate-range hypersonic missile to the territory of its ally Belarus in the second half of next year. Putin was responding to a request from Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko at a summit in Minsk, where the two leaders signed a mutual defense pact.
“… Since we have today signed an agreement on security guarantees using all available forces and means, I consider the deployment of systems like Oreshnik on the territory of the Republic of Belarus to be feasible,” Putin said.
“I think this will be possible in the second half of next year, as the serial production of these systems in Russia increases and these missile systems enter service with the Russian strategic forces,” he added in televised remarks.
Russia first fired Oreshnik at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on November 21, in what Putin said was a response to Ukraine’s use of US ATACM ballistic missiles and British Storm Shadows to invade Russian territory with Western permission.
Putin has said that Russia could use the Oreshnik again if Ukraine continues to attack Russia with long-range Western weapons, including to hit “decision centers” in Kiev. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview released late Thursday to American journalist Tucker Carlson that Moscow had fired Oreshnik.
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Oreshnik
Putin has boasted that the Oreshnik (hazel tree) is unstoppable and has destructive power comparable to that of a nuclear weapon, even when fitted to a conventional warhead. Some Western experts have cast doubt on Putin’s claims about the missile, which they say is based on a system Russia tested as an intercontinental ballistic missile at one point before putting its development on ice.
The Oreshnik’s novel feature, experts said, was that it could carry multiple warheads capable of hitting different targets simultaneously — typically associated with long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles.
On Friday, Putin told Lukashenko that Belarus – which shares a border with NATO members Poland, Latvia and Lithuania – would determine targets for Oreshniks based on its territory.
Putin said the new mutual defense treaty would “make it possible to reliably protect the security of Russia and Belarus,” TASS state news agency reported.
Last month Putin approved changes that lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a wider range of conventional attacks and extended Moscow’s nuclear umbrella to cover Belarus. Nuclear weapons were withdrawn from Belarus after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, but Putin announced last year that Russia was keeping strategic nuclear missiles there as a deterrent to the West.
Lukashenko said in October that any use of Russian nuclear weapons stationed in Belarus would require his personal consent.