The exiled Belarusian opposition leader has warned of the danger of Russia putting nuclear weapons in ‘the hands of a crazy dictator’.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya made the scathing comments about Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko while speaking to the BBC in Warsaw, Poland.

She accused the west of ‘staying silent’ over the first deployment of nuclear weapons outside of Russia since the USSR collapsed in 1991.

Lukashenko is seen as a key ally to Russia, with Belarus acting as a launchpad for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last February.

Lukashenko announced the first ‘missiles and bombs’ had arrived in the country on Russian state television, and when the presenter asked him to confirm if Belarus had received weapons sooner than expected, he replied: ‘Not all of them. Gradually.’

He claimed the Russian bombs were ‘three times more powerful’ than those dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan during World War II.

Lukashenko also said he hadn’t simply asked Putin for the weapons – ‘I demanded them back,’ he said, claiming he needed them to protect against external aggression.

Belarus, like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, gave up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990s in return for security guarantees from post-Soviet Russia and the west.

There isn’t any proof that nuclear weapons have been delivered to Belarus yet, but if they are, it marks a significant reversal.

Moscow announced the move in March and says it will retain control of the missiles.

‘This deployment creates no new threat to Nato countries, so they don’t take it seriously,’ Ms Tikhanovskaya argued, believing that western countries see no difference between a missile fired from Russia or from Belarus.

‘But Belarus is our country and we don’t want nuclear weapons.

‘This is like the last step to keeping our independence. And they [in the west] are staying silent about that.’

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