NATO countries’ nuclear facilities to be permanently installed in Poland will become a military target for Russia, he declared Sergei Ryabkov Russian Deputy Foreign Minister to the Russian state news agency TASSZ on Thursday.
“There is no doubt that the expansion of NATO’s joint nuclear mission exercise – regardless of which country or countries join those already participating in this exercise – is clearly destabilizing. It represents a real threat,” said the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. According to the diplomat, the approach of the joint nuclear missions of the NATO countries to the border intensifies the threat to the Russian Federation. “Not to mention the permanent installation, which the hotheads in Warsaw have also started talking about,” Ryabkov said.
“Therefore, all those politicians who are now enthusiastically discussing such a plan in Poland and beyond its borders must understand: such moves in this direction will not increase Poland’s security, and the objects themselves will definitely become targets. And they will come to the fore in our military planning,” he added. 4
The Russian Deputy Foreign Minister called the debate about the installation of NATO nuclear facilities in Poland “an unfolding story”. He emphasized that Moscow is monitoring how “different elements of the Polish executive power, and not only them, shape this topic in their internal discourse.”
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman on Monday predicted that the Russian military would take the necessary security measures if nuclear weapons were installed in Poland. Ryabkov and Peskov responded that Andrzej Duda Speaking to the Polish newspaper Fakt, the Polish president declared that his country is ready for nuclear weapons to be installed on its territory, and that it is negotiating with the United States. Duda cited the fact that Russia is “increasingly militarizing” the Kaliningrad region and has also installed nuclear weapons in Belarus.
According to the Russian daily RBK, negotiations on the deployment of nuclear weapons in Poland have been ongoing for years, and the Polish Ministry of Defense previously announced that they planned to join the NATO program (Nuclear Sharing), which envisages the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons abroad, in 2015. In the fall of 2022, then-Deputy Spokesman of the US State Department Vedant Patel said that the US would not deploy nuclear weapons to countries that joined NATO after 1997. Poland became a member of the association in 1999.
The debate intensified again after that Vladimir Putin last spring, the Russian president announced that he had decided to install nuclear weapons in Belarus. After Poland signaled its willingness to play a greater role in nuclear deterrence and join the nuclear program, Moscow reacted negatively to Warsaw’s position. Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, said that “the request to install a nuclear weapon in Poland threatens only one thing: that such a weapon will be used.” As early as 2022, the Kremlin said that the move would increase tensions in the region.
Tags: Russia Poland military target nuclear weapons installed Belarus
