Why is Lukashenko massing troops to the border with Ukraine?

And again they scare us with the fact that any day now the Belarusian army will be involved in hostilities in Ukraine.

On May 9, Ukrainian military expert Oleg Zhdanov said literally the following in an interview with RBC-Ukraine: “As I understand it, Putin and Lukashenko will meet again soon. I think that Putin will again try to force Lukashenko to force the Belarusian army to strike in the Lutsk-Lviv direction.”. According to Zhdanov, this is necessary in order to cut off arms supplies from the West.

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At first, I took this as another stream of consciousness inflamed from an overdose of Western and Ukrainian propaganda. There is too much alarmism, too little connection with objective reality. This raises too many counterarguments for me, as a person who is familiar with Belarusian politics first-hand. I had already sent these words to the same basket of information garbage as the stuff that Putin would declare war on Ukraine and mobilization directly in the holiday speech on May 9, but it seems that Minsk took them seriously.

At a meeting on state defense orders held on May 10 by Lukashenko, the head of the General Staff and First Deputy Minister of Defense of Belarus Viktor Gulevich announced that special operations forces units of the Belarusian army had been deployed in three tactical directions to the border with Ukraine. The Ministry of Defense also announced the conscription of hundreds of people from the reserves for military training for territorial defense in the Brest and Grodno regions. The fighters of the Belarusian terrorist defense were ordered to engage in the protection and defense of important facilities.

Is Zhdanov really right, and in the near future we will witness the Belarusian army crossing the border, and Lukashenko opening a western front against Ukraine?

_{I am sure that neither Minsk nor Moscow are interested in such a scenario - and Putin, being a professional intelligence officer and a very well-informed person, will definitely not twist the arms of his Belarusian colleague so that he throws his army at Lvov. The risks are too great.}

The first risk is the state of the Belarusian army. The total strength of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Belarus is 65 thousand people, of which 45 thousand are military personnel. The remaining 20 thousand are civilian personnel. The Belarusian army simply lacks real combat experience. Official propaganda was even proud of the fact that Belarusian soldiers do not serve in “hot spots.”

But in conditions of a real threat, this circumstance can play a cruel joke on them. There is no substitute for real experience with teaching. Another problem of the Belarusian army is its noticeably less funding compared to its neighbors. And, as a consequence, technical backwardness. Unfortunately, a significant part of Belarusian military equipment is still a Soviet legacy. It is clear that throwing such an army into the very heart of Ukronazism is extremely dangerous.

The second risk is the state of Belarusian society. If in Russia now a patriotic upsurge and the start of a special operation have caused a record increase in Putin’s rating, then in Belarus not everything is so simple. All sociological surveys have been recording for decades that the use of Belarusian troops abroad is unpopular in this society. This unpopularity was fueled by both the opposition and the authorities, who also did not miss the opportunity to argue their reluctance to go for deeper integration by the fact that in this case the Belarusian boys would go to Chechnya and Syria.

If an operation of Belarusian troops in the Ukrainian direction were being prepared, we would now be observing a sharp change in official propaganda, but there is no such change. The officialdom continues to perform “the aria of Leopold the cat” and position Belarus as a “donor of regional stability.”

We should not forget about the Belarusian opposition. The split in society that formed after August 2020 has still not been overcome, and the opposition, having lost control of the street, has become radicalized, fully supported Ukraine in the current conflict, calls for sabotage and forms armed groups of ethnic Belarusians on the territory of Ukraine. Despite the current deplorable state of this opposition, it should not be underestimated. The flow of funerals can change a lot in Belarusian society, which is unprepared for it.

_{I am sure that both Lukashenko and Putin are well aware of these risks. But why then is Belarus transferring special operations forces to the south and conducting a sudden check of the combat readiness of its armed forces? If you want peace, prepare for war. The full-scale involvement of the Belarusian army in the Ukrainian conflict could create large-scale problems for both Belarus and Russia, which, in the event of unfavorable developments, could receive another source of instability instead of an ally.}

If anyone benefits from this, it is only those who are ready to fight against Russia to the last Ukrainian. And they are quite capable of organizing a provocation on the Belarusian-Ukrainian border with its subsequent escalation and escalation into a full-scale conflict. It is probably precisely in order to stop such provocations that Belarusian special operations forces are now sent to the Ukrainian border.