Will Belarus Join the War?
Sixty-four thousand troops. Nuclear warheads on the border. And the thing that actually decides this is none of them.
On the morning of 21 May 2026, Alexander Lukashenko pulled on a field uniform and went to inspect a line of Iskander missiles at a unit in the Mogilev region. He looked, by the official account, delighted.
I dreamed about this machine a long time ago.
Alexander Lukashenko, inspecting nuclear-capable missiles during the drills.
That same morning, the Russian and Belarusian defence ministries released joint footage of nuclear munitions being trucked to a storage site inside Belarus. Several hundred kilometres east, Vladimir Putin sat across a table from Xi Jinping in Beijing, Ukraine on the agenda between them. None of it was accident. Nothing about the four days just gone had been.
Between 18 and 21 May, Russia ran its largest strategic nuclear exercise in years and choreographed a Belarusian drill to run alongside it. The Russian figures were built to be repeated.
More than 64,000 personnel. Over 7,800 pieces of equipment and weapons. More than 200 missile launchers, 140 aircraft, 73 surface ships, and 13 submarines, eight of them strategic.
Those forces ranged from the Arctic to the Pacific. The part that actually touched Belarus was smaller and quieter: a rehearsal of moving and arming the tactical nuclear weapons Russia now keeps on Belarusian soil, signed off with simulated launches of ballistic and hypersonic missiles. It was the first such drill since Russia stationed its Oreshnik there, the hypersonic missile it first fired into Ukraine in November 2024.
Kyiv read it as a countdown, and said so out loud.
Zelensky had already pushed fresh troops north. On 20 May he told his commanders that Russia was war-gaming new attacks toward Chernihiv and Kyiv, the exact axis the columns took in 2022. His commander in chief did not hedge.
The threat from Belarus, and possible operations in the north, is real.
Oleksandr Syrskyi, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
