Russia has criticized a proposed permanent U.S. military base in Lithuania and plans advanced by the country's lawmakers on Tuesday to scrap a ban on nuclear weapons being stationed in the country. Lithuania's Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevicius said on Tuesday Vilnius would be willing to pay the cost of establishing a new American base in the Baltic country, shortly after President Donald Trump said the U.S. would "certainly look" at whether a U.S. military facility in the country would be viable. Roughly 1,000 U.S. soldiers are currently regularly deployed to Lithuania on a rotational basis.
Meanwhile, Lithuania's parliament voted to push forward a change to the country's constitution, which would strike off a veto on weapons of mass destruction being deployed on Lithuanian soil. This could open up a path for nuclear weapons owned and controlled by other NATO states to be positioned in Lithuania, which borders Russia's Kaliningrad region and Moscow ally, Belarus. A final vote is scheduled for mid-January, according to Lithuania's parliamentary speaker.
Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on Tuesday that a build-up of NATO forces on Russia's doorstep "cannot be perceived as anything other than a step toward escalating tensions, just as the deployment of nuclear weapons in a neighboring country cannot." "They will, to our regret, mark yet another significant escalation of tensions," Peskov said in comments reported by Russian state media. "Moscow will be forced to take all necessary measures to guarantee its own security," he added. This is a breaking story and will be updated.
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