RUSSIA: Russia will supply Belarus with Iskander-M missile systems within a few months, Russian President Vladimir Putin told a televised meeting with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Saturday.
At the meeting, held in St Petersburg, Lukashenko told Putin that Belarus was concerned by the “aggressive”, “confrontational” and “repulsive” policies of its neighbours Lithuania and Poland.
He asked Putin to help Belarus mount a “symmetrical response” to what he said were nuclear-armed flights by the U.S.-led NATO alliance near Belarus’s borders.
He did, however, promise to supply the Iskander-M, a mobile guided missile system codenamed “SS-26 Stone” by NATO, which replaced the Soviet “Scud”. Its two guided missiles have a range of up to 500 km (300 miles) and can carry conventional or nuclear warheads.
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that the European Union (EU) and NATO were building a coalition to engage in a war with Moscow and compared them to “Hitler during World War II”.
“When World War II broke out, Hitler united a significant number, if not most, of the European countries under his banner for a war against the Soviet Union,” TASS News Agency quoted Lavrov as saying at a press conference following talks with Azerbaijani top diplomat Jeyhun Bayramov in Baku on Friday.
“Today, the EU and NATO are acting in a similar way, building a modern coalition of the same kind for a fight and pretty much a war against Russia,” he added. - INDIAN EXPRESS, THE STATESMAN
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