President Putin said the move would not violate nuclear non-proliferation agreements and compared it to the US stationing its weapons in Europe, according to Russian state media. The announcement to station weapons in Belarus comes only days after Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Moscow, during which Russia and China issued a joint statement saying "all nuclear powers must not deploy their nuclear weapons beyond their national territories, and they must withdraw all nuclear weapons deployed abroad. "The Kremlin took Belarus as a nuclear hostage," Oleksiy Danilov wrote on Twitter