Russia could deploy its new Oreshnik intermediate-range hypersonic missile on the territory of its ally Belarus in 2025, Vladimir Putin declared.
The Russian president responded to a request from his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko, at a summit in Minsk, where the two leaders signed a mutual defense pact today.
“As for the possibility of deploying such formidable weapons, frankly, as the Oreshnik on the territory of Belarus: since today we have signed an agreement on security guarantees using all available forces and means, I consider that the deployment of systems such as the Oreshnik on the territory of the Republic of Belarus is feasible,” Putin said.
“I believe this will be possible in the second half of next year, as serial production of these systems increases in Russia and as these missile systems enter service with Russian strategic forces,” he added in televised comments.
Russia fired the Oreshnik into a Ukrainian city last month in what Putin described as a first test of the weapon under combat conditions.
It has boasted that it is impossible to intercept and has enormous destructive power, even when equipped with a conventional warhead.
Some Western experts are skeptical of Putin’s claims about the missile, which they say is based on a system that Russia had at one time tested as an intercontinental weapon before freezing its development.
Chilling footage shows Vladimir Putin’s new Oreshnik hypersonic weapon attacking a defense plant in Dnipro, Ukraine, on November 21, 2024.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko take part in a signing ceremony following a meeting of the Supreme State Council of the State of the Union of Russia and Belarus in Minsk, Belarus, December 6, 2024.
The moment when Russia first used the Oreshnik to attack the Dnipro, November 21.
Putin told Lukashenko that Belarus, which shares borders with NATO members Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, would determine the Oreshniks’ targets based on its territory.
The two men met in the Belarusian capital on Friday to mark the 25th anniversary of the Union State, a borderless union and alliance between the former Soviet republics.
Putin said the mutual defense treaty “will make it possible to reliably protect the security of Russia and Belarus, thus creating conditions for further peaceful and sustainable development of the two states,” according to the state news agency TASS.
The Kremlin leader approved changes last month that lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike against Russia and expanded Moscow’s nuclear umbrella to cover Belarus.
Nuclear weapons were removed from Belarus after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, but Putin announced last year that Russia was placing tactical nuclear missiles there as a deterrent to the West.
Lukashenko, in power in Belarus since 1994, said in October that any use of Russian nuclear weapons now deployed in Belarus would require his personal consent.