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In an increasingly electric environment due to the accumulation of Russian troops along the Ukrainian borders and Western alerts about another invasion of the strategic eastern country, Moscow raises the tension with new joint military maneuvers with Belarus. The exercises, which will begin on February 10, add another hot spot to the scenario in Ukraine, which shares around a thousand kilometers of borders with Belarus, and join other Russian maneuvers in the Black Sea, the Caspian and southern regions. of the Caucasus close to Georgia. Russian armored vehicles began arriving in Belarus on Tuesday. They join the movement of trains loaded with dozens of vehicles and weapons that continue to advance from distant points of Russia towards the eastern borders.
The United Kingdom, meanwhile, sent weapons to Ukraine, a “defensive” support in response to “increasingly threatening behavior by Russia”, according to British Defense Chief Ben Wallace. “We have made a decision to supply Ukraine with light anti-tank defensive weapons systems,” said Wallace, who has invited his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, to London for talks.
In addition, “a small number” of British specialists will train the Ukrainian army in the use of the supplied weaponry. UK instructors have been in Ukraine since 2015, on armed forces training programmes, and London has also sold ships to Kiev and provided a loan of some 2 billion euros to modernize its navy. Russia considers Ukraine’s defense agreements with its Western allies a provocation, as well as the presence of military specialists in the country that is going to celebrate eight years of war in the Donbas region with pro-Russian separatists supported militarily and politically by the Kremlin. The last war in Europe has already claimed some 14,000 lives.
The military maneuvers of the Russian and Belarusian armies – the second important ones this year, after those of last September – will take place between February 10 and 20. With the name of Allied Determination-2022, will unfold at two points: the western edge of Belarus, near Lithuania and Poland (both NATO members), and along the border with Ukraine, a scenario that intelligence in Kiev and the West had already anticipated as one of the possible entry points of the Russian threat, when Minsk and the Kremlin are ever closer. They also fear that these moves are a ruse to semi-permanently plant Russian boots in Belarus.
Moscow has not revealed how many soldiers will take part in the exercises or how much heavy weapons will be moved, although Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said at a briefing Tuesday with military attachés that he plans to send 12 Su-35 advanced fighters and two S-400 anti-aircraft system batteries. They will participate in measures to search for and destroy “illegal formations” and the defense of the border against “armed groups of militants”, according to Fomin, quoted by the state agency Tass.
Aleksandr Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist for decades, assured on Monday that joint military exercises are necessary due to the alleged increase in NATO forces in Poland and the Baltics and the increase in Ukrainian soldiers along the borders with Belarus, a rather porous border that Kiev recently began to reinforce. Lukashenko, who had traditionally been a buffer between Russia and the West, is growing closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin, his key supporter since the protests against electoral fraud and for democracy that rocked Belarus in 2020 and which he harshly cracked down on.
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The Ukrainian government has already warned that Russia may launch a new attack – in 2014 the Crimean peninsula was annexed with a referendum considered illegal by the international community and held with a Russian military presence – from various directions, including from Belarus. According to calculations by Ukrainian and US intelligence, Russia has concentrated some 80,000 soldiers along the Ukrainian borders and several thousand more in Crimea. They also believe that the Kremlin has not yet made a decision on another military intervention, but also maintain that it may be waiting for the muddy ground of its eastern borders and eastern Ukraine to freeze to operate without problems with heavy vehicles.
Moscow, meanwhile, denies invasion plans, arguing that it can mobilize its troops freely within its borders and that it does so because of the “growing threat” from NATO. Putin demands written guarantees from the Atlantic Alliance and the United States that Ukraine and other member countries of the former USSR (such as Georgia) will not join the organization, despite receiving the invitation in 2008; an invitation that is far from materializing.
The Kremlin is also seeking some kind of legal agreement that would force NATO to withdraw to the positions it occupied in 1997. Moscow, Washington and the Alliance have held diplomatic talks this month on the issue without reaching any solution to de-escalate a situation. increasingly hot.
As tension rises, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry announced Tuesday that it will speed up plans to form reservist battalions, which will enable the rapid deployment of some 130,000 conscripts to add to its 240,000-strong army; battalions that will include volunteers from the Territorial Defense Forces, to which people between the ages of 18 and 60 have signed up.
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