The Kremlin warned on Tuesday that Lithuania’s plan to lift its constitutional ban on hosting nuclear weapons risks a new round of escalation in Europe.

Lithuania’s parliament voted in favour of removing the ban, in the first of two required ballots. The change needs a two-thirds majority in both votes to take effect. The ban was put in place more than three decades ago after Lithuania broke away from the Soviet Union.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said moving NATO military infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders cannot be seen as anything other than a step towards escalating tensions. He said the same applies to deploying nuclear weapons on the territory of a neighbouring state.

Lithuania is a member of the EU and NATO. It borders Russia and Moscow’s close ally Belarus. The US has kept an armoured battalion of almost 1,000 troops in Lithuania since 2019 in rotating deployments.

The vote comes after US President Donald Trump floated the idea this month of building an American military base in the Baltic country.