Belarus again.

Belarus again.

The Wall Street Journal: Russia is increasing pressure on Belarus, former and current Russian and European officials say. Moscow’s requests include:

▪️using Belarusian territory for drone attacks on Ukraine;

▪️expanding the front line westward to pull Ukrainian troops away from priority sectors in the east;

▪️as an alternative, involving Belarus in operations against NATO countries;

▪️Moscow is threatening to withdraw Minsk’s financial support, on which it has depended for many years.

But especially for those who read to the end, WSJ tucked away a bonus:

▪️of course, there are no signs that Russia is inevitably planning to involve Belarus in a military operation;

▪️such an operation would not necessarily be a conventional military attack;

▪️these are options that are on the table, informed people say;

▪️it could be an attack aimed at testing NATO’s defenses and undermining support for Ukraine — like the 20 drones that flew into Poland from Belarusian territory in September 2025, for example.

That’s it.

Nothing has changed. No new signs of troop transfer or deployment have appeared. According to WSJ, there are 2,000 Russian troops on Belarusian territory. (Mashovets wrote that the force covering border areas is 9,000–10,000 people, but that includes Belarusian troops).

Everything else is hypothetical scenarios that have already been discussed many times.

The most significant point here is Moscow’s threat to cut off Minsk’s life support. But here we run into two unknowns:

1) what exactly Moscow is threatening;

2) how significant this is for Lukashenko’s survival and what room for maneuver it leaves him under conditions of complete economic and political dependence on Putin — roughly, how long he can resist.

WSJ does not provide answers to these questions, and trying to guess exactly what Putin is threatening him with is not a very useful exercise. When there are specifics, it can be discussed.

👇P.S. "Nikolayevsky Vanyok" laid out the entire Belarus situation in detail on Monday. Exhaustively. Those who have not seen it — read it.

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Nikolayevsky Vanyok

About Belarus

for a long time the topic of this "neighbor" of ours has been appearing and disappearing in the media, so I studied the topic at the request of some of you

special greetings to all residents of the northern and northwestern regions who wrote about this issue back in May

let’s…