THE Russia it will start to grow regularly nuclear weapons at Belarus after April 7-8 only the special storage facilities will be ready, the president said today Vladimir Putinmarking Moscow’s first transfer of such bombs outside of Russian territory since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

More than 15 months after the start of Europe’s biggest ground war since World War II, Putin says the United States and its Western allies are funneling weapons into Ukraine as part of an expanding proxy war aimed at bringing Russia to its knees .

Putin announced in March that he wants to deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, in an apparent warning to the US-led NATO military alliance over its support for Ukraine

Major NATO countries say they will support Ukraine and help it defend itself as long as necessary from what Kiev calls an imperial-style land grab by Russia, which threatens the survival of the Ukrainian state.

“So everything is done according to plan, everything is stable,” Putin told his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko as they discussed the planned deployment of nuclear weapons during talks at the Russian president’s summer residence in Sochi on the Black Sea.

“The preparation of the relevant facilities is completed on July 7-8, and we will immediately start activities related to the development of the appropriate types of weapons on your territory,” Putin said, according to the Kremlin statement.

Lukashenko replied: “Thank you, Vladimir Vladimirovich.”

Putin, 70, is pitching the war as a battle for Russia’s own survival against what he says is an ever-expanding NATO. He has warned the West that Moscow will not back down.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says Ukraine will not rest, however, until the last Russian soldier is expelled from his country, which he wants to bring into NATO as soon as possible.

Putin’s nuclear move is being watched closely by both the United States and its NATO allies in Europe and China, which has repeatedly warned against using nuclear weapons in the conflict.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States and Russia worked hard to return to Russia the vast Soviet nuclear arsenal, which was then deployed in the newly independent republics of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.

Only the United States had used nuclear weapons – in the 1945 attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.