Deploying short- and medium-range missiles in Eastern European countries will turn them into a military staging ground, Russian military expert Vladislav Shurygin believes.
“In this case, each of these countries might become a nuclear desert,” he warned.
And their residents might become ‘hostages whom one will start to shoot’, the expert said.
At the moment, the ‘war zone’ is 500 km (i.e. Iskander range of application), Shurygin stressed.
According to him, such a scenario will be plausible if the US decides to deploy nuclear weapons in eastern Europe after denouncing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. It should be noted that the White house has not voiced such plans.
On 20 October 2018US president Donald Trump announced that he was withdrawing the US from the treaty. According to a number of US politicians, the Kremlin had repeatedly violated it.
In October, Russian envoy Mikhail Babich told Belarusian state-run TV that Moscow would consider any attack on Belarus as an assault on Russia with ‘all that it implies’. He commented on the feasibility of establishing permanent US military base in Poland.
