Earlier this year the US announced that it would once again station intermediate-range missiles in Europe
The decision to allow the deployment of Russia’s latest ‘Oreshnik’ hypersonic missiles in Belarus is a direct response to American plans to station medium-range missiles in Germany, the deputy chief of Belarus’ armed forces has said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko signed a security treaty on Friday, allowing both countries to use all forces and means at their disposal. After the meeting, Putin said that Oreshnik missile systems could be stationed in Belarus as early as the second half of next year, depending on how soon they enter regular service with Russia’s strategic forces.
”The decision to deploy Oreshnik missile systems in the territory of the Republic of Belarus has been made in response to the steps being taken by the United States and Germany to deploy medium-range missiles in Europe,” Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Belarus Sergei Lagodyuk told BelTA news agency on Saturday.
During a NATO summit in July, Washington and Berlin announced that the multipurpose Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), the Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile, and a hypersonic missile still in development would be stationed in Wiesbaden, Germany, from 2026 onwards.
SM-6 missiles have a range of up to 460km (290 miles), while Tomahawk cruise missiles can strike targets more than 2,500km away, placing them within range of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other major Russian cities.
The move would previously have been banned under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. The US unilaterally withdrew from the treaty in 2019, claiming that some of Russia’s cruise missiles had breached the agreement. Russia denied breaking the deal, and said it would continue to abide by its terms.
After the NATO summit, however, Putin said that Russia would “consider ourselves free” to resume medium-range missile deployments, and would adopt “mirror measures” in response to the US-German decision.
The Russian military carried out the first-ever combat test of the Oreshnik (Russian for ‘hazel tree’) last month, using the ballistic missile to batter a Ukrainian military industrial facility in Dnepropetrovsk with multiple hypersonic warheads. The test, which came after the US, France, and Britain gave Ukraine permission to use their missiles in attacks on internationally-recognized Russian territory, was intended to demonstrate that “there will always be a response” to escalation by the West, Putin said afterwards.
Any Oreshniks deployed in Belarus will be operated by the Russian Strategic Missile Forces (RSMF), Putin explained on Friday. However, he noted, it will be up to Belarus to choose potential targets for these missiles based on its own security needs.
