Moscow says it would respond with ‘countermeasures’, after US air force budget item hinted at possible move
The Russian foreign ministry has said Moscow will view any move to return US nuclear weapons to the UK as an escalation and will respond with “countermeasures” for its own security.
The foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova was responding to a report last week about an item in the 2024 US air force budget forin Suffolk for personnel on a “potential surety mission” – military jargon for nuclear safety and security. It raised the prospect of the return of US nuclear weapons to British soil for the first time in more than 15 years.
“If this step is ever made, we will view it as escalation, as a step toward escalation that would take things to a direction that is quite opposite to addressing the pressing issue of pulling all nuclear weapons out of European countries,” Zakharova said. “In the context of the transition of the United States and Nato to an openly confrontational course of inflicting a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia, this practice and its development force us to take compensating countermeasures designed to reliably protect the security interests of our country and its allies.” to have 100 B61 gravity bombs deployed in Europe and another 100 B61s – the only tactical weapon in its arsenal – in storage in the US.
“It’s highly unlikely that the Russian government would describe its own nuclear sharing arrangements in Belarus as escalatory or destabilising and yet the parallels between the two situations are clearly visible.”
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