Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has suggested Russian tactical nuclear weapons have already arrived in his country, even as Russian President Vladimir Putin said delivery would only begin next month.
"We have missiles and bombs, we have received from Russia,” Lukashenko told a Russian TV reporter in an interview posted by the Belarusian state-owned Belta news service late Tuesday. He then boasted that the weapons are "three times more powerful” than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, saying they were capable of killing a million people "immediately.”
When the reporter asked him to clarify that the nuclear weapons promised by Russia had been delivered, however, Lukashenko chuckled and appeared to backtrack. Saying they were taking the issue "slowly,” he promised to blindfold the journalist and take her to a storage facility to see the weapons "once we get them.”