Russia, Belarus stage nuclear drills amid rising tensions with West

KYIV, Ukraine – Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko this week participated for the first time in a rehearsal of Russia’s tactical and strategic nuclear weapons use, officials said.

Between Tuesday and Thursday, Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw joint military drills spanning Eastern Europe to the Pacific, involving hundreds of Russian missile launchers, warplanes, warships and nuclear submarines.

“We threaten absolutely no one,” said Lukashenko, 71, a former collective farm director who has led his ex-Soviet nation since 1994. “But we have such weapons, and we’re ready in every possible way to defend our common fatherland from [the western Belarusian city of] Brest to [Russia’s Pacific port of] Vladivostok.”

Lukashenko, often labeled “Europe’s last dictator,” does not concentrate all his political power in one basket.

For years, Moscow has provided political backing, economic preferences and cheap hydrocarbons. Yet Lukashenko resisted Putin’s efforts to merge Belarus with Russia under “union state” agreements dating to the 1990s. In recent months, ties between Belarus and the United States have warmed.

So what drives Belarus’s involvement in Russia’s nuclear war games?

“It’s important to further boost the level of readiness of strategic and tactical nuclear forces,” Putin said Thursday.

Both Moscow and Minsk will “take into account the experience of the special military operation,” he said, referring to Russia’s four-year-old war in Ukraine.

Putin and Lukashenko ordered the launch of the intercontinental, hypersonic Yars missile, capable of carrying three independently targetable nuclear warheads.

In under 20 minutes, the missile flew 5,750km (3,573 miles) from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northwestern Arkhangelsk region to the Pacific Kamchatka Peninsula.

“The events develop suddenly, seemingly without any external reasons,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher at Germany’s Bremen University who has written hundreds of detailed analyses of the Russia-Ukraine war, told Al Jazeera.

“Something big is taking place, something that will be significant for international politics in general, and for mass media, including the very supply of nuclear arms,” he said.

As part of the drills, Moscow supplied Minsk with modified Su-25 fighter jets and Iskander-M ballistic missiles with a range of up to 500km (310 miles), along with nuclear weapons reportedly stored at the Asipovichi military range, less than 200km (124 miles) north of the Ukrainian border.

Days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Lukashenko held a “referendum” to amend Belarus’s constitution and permit nuclear weapons on its territory.

In June 2023, Putin announced the deployment of tactical, short-range nuclear arms to Belarus, claiming he was mirroring Washington’s decades-long practice of placing nukes at military bases in NATO member states in Europe. He also said Moscow would upgrade Belarusian strategic bombers to carry nuclear bombs.

Tactical nuclear weapons are not regulated by treaties between the two major nuclear powers, the U.S. and Russia. Their small size makes them harder to track and monitor.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said Wednesday that if Moscow uses nuclear weapons against Ukraine, the alliance’s response would be “devastating.”

On Friday, Rutte heads a summit of foreign ministers of NATO member states in Sweden’s Helsingborg.

The venue is symbolic – Sweden joined the alliance after Moscow’s full-scale invasion – and the Russia-Belarus drills are clearly timed to the summit.

Moscow and Minsk claimed this week’s drills were triggered by an unspecified “threat of aggression.”

But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on May 15 that Russia is dragging Belarus into “new acts of aggression.”

Six days later, Zelenskyy warned that the drills may be part of Moscow’s preparations for a new offensive against northern Ukraine and Kyiv after Russian troops failed to capture sizeable areas in eastern and southern Ukraine this year.

However, the current concentration of Russian forces in Belarus is “insufficient” for a new offensive, according to the head of the Kyiv-based Penta think tank.

“Attacking Ukraine with Belarusian forces alone may end very badly for Lukashenko,” Volodymyr Fesenko told Al Jazeera. “For him, involving Belarus in the war is too big a risk.”

In early 2022, Minsk allowed Moscow to cross the Belarusian-Ukrainian border – which stretches 1,084km (674 miles) across Europe’s densest forests and swamps – as a springboard to invade northern Ukraine and the Kyiv region.

Parts of the border lie within the Alienation Zone around the shut-down Chornobyl nuclear plant, site of the largest nuclear disaster in history, and some Russian troops were reportedly heavily irradiated.

The offensive and the “takeover of Kyiv in three days” that the Kremlin anticipated failed. Weeks later, Putin ordered a withdrawal.

But Russian troops continued to launch missiles and drones from Belarus.

Despite the threatening rhetoric and impressive video footage of the drills, some observers say they are nothing but bluff aimed at intimidating the West.

The drills also represent an unorthodox way to restart direct diplomatic contacts between Minsk and Kyiv.

“I’d say it’s sabre-rattling. And not even with sabres but with threats,” Igar Tyskevych, a Belarus-born political analyst based in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.

By issuing warnings and alarming the West, Zelenskyy “deliberately upped the ante to create a separate track for negotiations,” he said.

As a result, Lukashenko “sent a personal signal that he’s ready for this track,” Tyskevych said.

Lukashenko made it clear Thursday – signaling his readiness to hold talks with Zelenskyy.

“We’re not going to get sucked into the war in Ukraine. There’s no need for it, neither civil nor military,” Lukashenko was quoted by the state-run Belta news agency as saying.

“If [Zelenskyy] wants to discuss something, seek advice, or anything else, he’s welcome,” he said. “I’m ready to meet him anywhere in Ukraine or Belarus.”

This readiness also signals Minsk’s economic woes.

Belarus, a United Kingdom-sized nation of 10 million, is an amber-preserved Soviet relic.

Its state-controlled economy is export-oriented, heavily dependent on exports of potassium fertiliser, gasoline made from discounted Russian crude, foodstuffs and timber.

Ukraine stopped buying Belarusian goods altogether, and the European Union reduced imports by more than two-thirds as part of sanctions slapped on Lukashenko for supporting Russia’s war.

In recent months, Lukashenko tried to avoid sanctions by renewing dialogue with Washington and joining U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace.

In response, Trump eased sanctions and began pressuring Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania to follow suit, allowing shipment of Belarusian fertiliser.

Ukraine will not fully resume ties while Lukashenko is in power, but may allow imports of some Belarusian goods after the war is frozen, analyst Tyshkevych said.

“The question is on what conditions the ties can be normalised,” he said. “Without separate talks with Minsk, Ukraine may have to heed to Washington’s recommendations to work with Lukashenko.”

But as strongmen are unpredictable, there remains a chance of drawing Belarus into Russia’s war in Ukraine, he said.

“Unfortunately, there is such a risk,” analyst Fesenko said.

“But I think, however, that Lukashenko is afraid of getting involved in the war. He’ll escape such a development,” he said.