Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu recently invoked the NATO boogeyman as justification for closer military integration with Belarus. And that may be a sign that Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s gambit to go all in on Moscow’s conflict with the West has convinced the Kremlin to keep him around.
After a meeting of top military officials in Moscow on October 20, Shoigu said that due to the threat from the Western alliance, he and his Belarusian counterpart Viktor Khrenin agreed to extend the lease on a Russian-operated early warning radar installation in the Brest region of Belarus near the Polish border and a naval communications center in Vileyka near Minsk. Shoigu also said Russia and Belarus plan to carry out large-scale military drills in 2023.
Intensifying military cooperation and integration between Moscow and Minsk is, of course, nothing new. This process has been underway for much of the past year. Lukashenka told reporters recently, for example, that Russia and Belarus were in the process of establishing “a single army with the Belarusian military forming its backbone in the western direction.”
And this is not just rhetoric. For the past year, Russia has been steadily expanding its military footprint in Belarus. The two countries conducted a record number of military exercises in 2021 with the constant rotation of forces effectively establishing a de facto permanent Russian troop presence in Belarus.
In September 2021, Russia deployed Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets to the Baranovichi air base in western Belarus. The jets and their pilots will be permanently based in Belarus, where they will fly joint missions and patrol the two countries’ borders.
Days before the aircraft arrived, Russian anti-aircraft missile troops began deploying to the western Belarusian city of Hrodna, near the country’s border with Poland and Lithuania, to set up a joint military training center. Russia and Belarus will also establish two more joint training centers on Russian territory, one in Kaliningrad and another in Nizhny Novgorod.