Putin’s ally lets him build up forces near Ukraine again

Bloomberg

The president of Belarus insists he won’t join Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine even as thousands of Russian troops are pouring back into his country. It’s a risk Ukraine can’t ignore.
As many as 9,000 Russian servicemen and almost 170 battle tanks, 200 armored personnel carriers, artillery and aircraft are arriving in Belarus as part of a “joint force” that Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko agreed to deploy in the nation bordering Ukraine to the north. They’re due to carry out live fire and missile drills in eastern and central Belarus.
Lukashenko allowed Putin to use Belarus as a launchpad for his failed attempt to seize Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, at the start of his invasion in February. Analysts say their aim now may be to distract Ukrainian forces advancing in the country’s east and south to retake territory that Putin claims to have annexed.
“We don’t kill anyone, we don’t send our troops anywhere,” Lukashenko told a meeting with his military officials this month, claiming Belarus’s support to Russia’s war in Ukraine is limited to protecting and supplying its forces and treating the wounded.
There is a growing threat of Russia renewing its offensive from Belarus, Ukrainian military spokesman Oleksiy Hromov said in a video briefing Thursday. The goal this time may be to strike further west to try to cut Ukraine’s supply lines of weapons and military equipment from US and European partners, he said.
With Putin’s backing, Lukashenko crushed widespread protests following disputed 2020 elections that extended his then 26-year rule. He risks stirring fresh tensions if Belarusian forces enter Ukraine because neither the military nor the public wants to join Russia’s war, according to exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.
“If for some reason there will be an order to invade, our soldiers will defect,” Tsikhanouskaya said in an interview in Brussels. “They will change sides, they will hide, they will flee Belarus, but they won’t fight.”
While any move to join the war could weaken Lukashenko’s ability to suppress dissent at home, there’s no reason to believe the military would stage a coup against him, according to an Oct. 18 assessment by Latvia’s intelligence service.
Russia and Belarus have a long history of military cooperation as part of a “Union State” agreement. Russia used massive joint exercises in Belarus in the weeks before Putin’s invasion to amass forces on Ukraine’s borders while repeatedly denying it planned to attack.