Alyaksandr Lukashenka chose a telling location last week to announce that Belarus would soon receive an enormous military hardware consignment from Russia.
Speaking in the eastern Belarusian city of Babruysk on September 1, the autocratic leader said Russia would be sending combat jets, helicopters, and air defense missile systems, possibly including S-400 missile systems, “in the near future.”
The significance of making such an announcement in Babruysk should be clear to anybody who has been following the cat-and-mouse game that has been Russian-Belarusian relations in recent years. Since 2013, Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin has been trying to strongarm Lukashenka into allowing a new Russian airbase in that city, and Lukashenka had long been resisting.
That is, apparently, until recently. Back in March 2021, Lukashenka indicated that he was prepared to drop his long-standing opposition to the base in Babruysk, which would host SU-27 fighter jets flown by Russian pilots. The city is already the site of a Belarusian air base.
Lukashenka’s announcement about a large new Russian military consignment was just the latest data point in a pattern indicating the intensifying militarization of Belarus and accelerating integration of the Russian and Belarusian armed forces.
On the day Lukashenka spoke, Russian anti-aircraft missile troops were arriving in the western Belarusian city of Hrodna, near the border with Poland and Lithuania, to set up a joint military training center. Days later, a shipment of SU-30SM fighter jets arrived at an airbase in Baranovichi, also in western Belarus. And from September 10-16, the massive joint Russian-Belarusian Zapad-2021 military exercises are scheduled to take place.
Moreover, the Zapad-2021 exercises follow a record number of joint military exercises between the two countries this year, with the constant rotation of Russian forces amounting to a de facto permanent Russian troop presence in Belarus.