Putin announced that training of the Belarusian military will begin on April 3 Gavriil GRIGOROV / SPUTNIK / AFP
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday accused NATO of trying in the 1930s to create a global axis with Italy and Japan in the image and likeness of Nazi Germany, an alliance that led to World War II.
“What is the United States doing? They are creating new and new alliances, giving Western analysts arguments to talk about the West building new axes,” Putin said in a remark on Russian public television.
The Russian president recalled that according to the new allied concept approved in 2022, NATO intends to “develop relations with the countries of the AsiaPacific region,” which would include New Zealand, Australia and South Korea.
“And they assure us that they will create a global NATO. But what is that? Earlier this year, if I’m not mistaken, the UK and Japan signed an agreement (…) to establish contacts and establish ties with the ground forces,” he said.
For all these reasons, “Western analysts, not us, are saying that the West is beginning to build a new axis similar to that created by the fascist regimes of Germany, Italy, and militarist Japan in the 1930s.”
At the same time, Putin denied that Russia and China are forging a “military alliance”, although he acknowledged that there was cooperation in the militarytechnical sphere.
“We’re not hiding anything. Everything is transparent, there is nothing secret (…), we hold military exercises. By the way, not only with China, but also with other countries, we continue them despite the events in Donbass , Zaporizhzhya and Kherson,” he explained.
Furthermore, he dismissed allegations that such a strategic relationship poses a threat to third countries, which Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping made clear in the joint political statement during Xi Jinping’s state visit earlier this week.
In the first part of the same interview, which aired on Saturday, Putin announced an agreement with Belarus, a country bordering Ukraine, to station tactical nuclear weapons on its territory.
Putin announced that training of the Belarusian military will begin on April 3 and that the underground silo to house said weapons will be built on July 1.
He originally claimed that the trigger for this decision was British plans to supply Kiev with depleted uranium ammunition, although he later admitted that the US had been doing the same thing in Europe for decades and that Belarusian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko had asked for the implementation of the weapons on several occasions.