Lukashenko: ‘If our Russian brothers need help, we will provide it’ | Belarusian official: Russia-Belarus joint drills are ‘defensive’
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Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko said Tuesday that his country is willing to offer more assistance to close ally Russia in its war against Ukraine. But Lukashenko stressed that Russia does not need “any help” right now.
The Belarusian defence ministry and its official news outlet, Voen TV, on Tuesday (January 31) published footage of the final stages of joint Russian-Belarusian air force drills taking place in western Belarus.
The secretary of Belarus’s state security council, Alexander Volfovich, who watched the war games, said that the drills were defensive in nature and threatened no one unlike those “which we observe in the adjacent territory”
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According to reports, the military units involved performed the air drills at the Ruzhany training range in the western Brest region of Belarus, including exercises to defeat an enemy’s air defence facilities, command and control establishments, and concentrations of military personnel and hardware.
Fighter jets simulated providing air support to attack aircraft and bombers.
Belarus has insisted the two-week air force drills, which began on January 16, are defensive in nature to prepare for possible combat missions, but the move comes as concerns grow that Moscow is pushing Minsk to join the conflict in Ukraine.
The Kremlin, for its part, has denied that it has been pressuring Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to take a more active role in what Moscow calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Russia and Belarus have also started a week-long session of staff training for the joint command of their regional grouping of forces, the Belarusian defence ministry said on Tuesday (January 31).
The training is part of preparations for joint drills that the two countries will hold in Russia in September, the ministry added in its statement.
