Russia Issues Nuclear Threats to Lithuania Over Vilnius’s Plan to Lift Nuke Ban

Russia has threatened Lithuania with nuclear weapons as the Baltic nation is eyeing a lift of its nuclear weapons ban.

Lithuania’s parliamentary parties provisionally agreed to the constitutional amendments in July, and the parliamentary Committee on Legal Affairs voted 7-2 on the proposal on Wednesday, Sept. 9, paving the way for a final decision in early 2027.

The lifting of the ban would allow NATO, of which Lithuania has been a member of since 2004, to deploy nuclear forces on its territory.

On Friday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov threatened Vilnius over the plan by saying the Baltic nation – once under Soviet occupation – will be “in the sights of our nuclear weapons.”

“And if there are nuclear weapons on the territory that are aimed at us, then the territory of this country will also be in the sights of our nuclear weapons,” Peskov told Russia’s Channel One on Friday, as reported by state media RIA Novosti.

Lithuania, one of Ukraine’s strongest backers in Europe, borders Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad to the west and staunch Moscow ally Belarus to the south, with Vilnius a mere two-hour drive from Minsk, Belarus’s capital.

Russia began deploying nuclear weapons to Belarus, a non-nuclear nation, in June 2023. In December 2025, Russia also deployed its nuclear-capable Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) to Belarus, whose combat use in Ukraine marked the first combat use of its kind in history.

In May, Belarus conducted a nuclear war drill with Russia, involving Belarusian military units tasked with the combat use of nuclear weapons and nuclear support operations.

In July, when discussions over the nuke ban gained traction in Vilnius’s parliament, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda attributed the need to changing geopolitical circumstances.

“The geopolitical situation is getting ​worse… Our constitution was written when geopolitical circumstances were totally different,” Nauseda said.