BELARUSIAN President Alexander Lukashenko says Kyiv has stationed more than 120,000 soldiers along its border with Belarus, the country’s state news agency reported, as fighting continues amid Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.
Lukashenko, a staunch ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said on Sunday that Minsk had deployed nearly a third of its armed forces along the entire border in response to the Ukrainian deployment, BelTA reported. Kyiv did not immediately respond to the claims.
“Seeing their aggressive policy, we have introduced there and placed in certain points – in case of war, they would be defence – our military along the entire border,” BelTA quoted Lukashenko as saying in an interview with Russian state television.
Lukashenko is “delivering some very serious threats to officials in Kyiv”, said Al Jazeera’s Dorsa Jabbari, reporting from Moscow.
The president made it clear that should Ukraine try to enter Belarusian soil, they will be on the offensive, Jabbari added.
Lukashenko did not say exactly how many Belarusian soldiers were deployed. Belarus’s professional army has about 48,000 soldiers and some 12,000 state border personnel, according to The Military Balance 2022 assessment of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The comments come against the backdrop of a Ukrainian incursion into Russia that began on August 6, when thousands of Kyiv’s soldiers smashed through Russia’s western border into the Kursk region in a major embarrassment for Putin’s military top brass.
Ukrainian forces on Sunday said they struck another bridge in the Kursk region, seeking to disrupt Moscow’s combat operations in the area.
Earlier on Sunday, Ukrainian drones attacked an oil storage facility in Russia’s southern Rostov region, sparking a large fuel fire, the regional governor confirmed.
“In the south-east of the Rostov region, air defences repelled a drone attack. As a result of falling debris on the territory of industrial storage facilities in Proletarsk, a diesel fuel fire broke out,” Governor Vasily Golubev said on Telegram. No injuries were reported and a second drone attack shortly afterwards, he said.
