When Russia invades Ukraine, Belarus makes its bases available to the Kremlin. Will the country now also send its soldiers to war? The ruler Lukashenko vehemently rejects mobilization – but under one scenario he would probably have no other choice.
After the announcement of mobilization in Russia, concerns about a possible mobilization are also growing in Belarus. The ruler Alexander Lukashenko is one of the few allies of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The dictator made his territories and bases available to the Russian army when it invaded Ukraine in February. Russia, in turn, is one of the few countries to recognize Lukashenko as President of Belarus. During the mass protests after the apparently falsified presidential election in 2020, Putin stood behind his confidants and thus ensured his political survival. The 68-year-old owes the fact that Lukashenko is in power primarily to his “big brother” in Moscow.
And yet Lukashenko repeatedly emphasizes his supposed independence. Even when it comes to sending its citizens to war, the Belarusian ruler claims that he does not want to follow the Russian example. Western media would try to create such a “situation”, Lukashenko said on Friday when visiting a war memorial near Minsk. But “there will be no mobilization,” assured the Belarusian ruler. “That’s a lie,” he added, looking at other assumptions.
Lukashenko had already announced on Tuesday that all security agencies would be mobilized and that the laws would be further tightened. “If we have to put a military unit on alert under the laws of war, then we have to do it,” the 68-year-old said at a meeting with National Security Council Secretary Alexander Wolfovich. There is a lack of “discipline that now has to be enforced by the authorities” in the country. Lukashenko did not explain exactly what his announcement meant.
Despite the mobilization in Russia, the probability of such a step in Belarus is rather small. For one thing, the geography of the war is different today than it was in March, for example, when some of the fighting took place in the immediate vicinity of the Belarusian border. In view of the great distance from the front, Lukashenko would have difficulty justifying Belarus’ participation in the war with ensuring its own state security.
Another argument against mobilization: the willingness of the Belarusians to fight against the Ukrainians is extremely low. While Russian propaganda declared the government in Kyiv to be an enemy as early as 2014 and has since referred to the Ukrainians as “Nazis”, the state media in Belarus adopted a much more moderate tone in relation to the southern neighbor, at least until recently.
Also, Lukashenko doesn’t enjoy nearly as much popular support in Belarus as Putin does in Russia. It has been clear since 2020 at the latest: the majority of Belarusians would like a life without Lukashenko. Against this background, the idea of ??mobilizing and arming the population seems rather unlikely. The shot could literally backfire for the regime.
And yet it could possibly happen that the Belarusians will have to fight the Ukrainians on the Russian side. According to a “union treaty” between Moscow and Minsk, Belarus is obliged to go to war if Russia is attacked, military expert Alexander Alesin told the Belarusian opposition newspaper “Nascha Niwa”. “The Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament, editor’s note) must declare war on Russia, or the State Duma of the Russian Federation must declare that it is at war with Ukraine. Then the Union Treaty between Belarus and Russia comes into effect force in which the parties pledge to defend each other’s territory as their own,” Alesin said.
As long as Russia has not introduced martial law, the “special operation” is its private affair, which cannot have any legal consequences for Belarus, explained the military expert. However, if one of the parties declared war on the other, Alesin said Belarus would be forced to fight alongside Russia – “and the first thing to do would be to declare mobilization.”
