DM Monitoring
MOSCOW: Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, told Russia’s defence minister on Monday that he wanted guarantees that Mos-cow would defend his country if it was attacked, the state-owned BelTA news agency reported.
BelTA cited Lukashenko as making the remarks to Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu during a meeting in the Belarusian capital Minsk.
Lukashenko was cited as saying that he had previously discussed the matter with Russian President Vladimir Putin who he said had agreed with him that such security guarantees were necessary and needed to be formalised. “In general, it sounded at the talks (with Putin) that in the case of aggression against Belarus, the Russian Federation would protect Belarus as its own territo-ry. These are the kind of security (guarantees) we need,” Lukashenko was quot-ed as saying.
Belarus, which currently hosts a contingent of Russian forces, has offered assis-tance to Moscow during its military campaign in Ukraine which Russia calls “a special military operation.”
In the war’s earliest days, Minsk allowed Moscow to use its territory to launch an ultimately unsuccessful assault on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
Since late last year, a flurry of military drills and visits from high-level Russian of-ficials have sparked speculation that Belarus may formally join a new attack on Ukraine. Lukashenko has consistently denied such intentions, but has said that Belarus will respond to any incursions onto its territory or attempts to foment unrest. On the other hand, An analysis of satellite images by a priviate media agency has revealed that Russian forces are fortifying the Crimean peninsula in anticipation of a Ukrainian attempt to recap-ture it.
Experts say that those defences are likely to make any such effort difficult and bloody.
Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, eight years before launching a full-scale inva-sion of Ukraine in February 2022. As the war grinds on for more than a year, Ukraine’s political and military leadership has made it clear that it defines victo-ry as reclaiming its 1991 borders, which Russia had recognised. The United Na-tions and all of Ukraine’s Western allies also recognise those borders, which in-clude Crimea.
The investigation by Al Jazeera’s Sanad news verification and monitoring unit found that between February and March, the Crimean border and surrounding areas were transformed into a fortified barrier ahead of an expected spring counteroffensive by Ukrainian forces.
In particular, an extensive network of trenches and defences was constructed and now extends across the border villages of Crimea. Construction and expan-sion of several significant military bases also took place during the same period, according to the images provided to Sanad by SkySat and Planet.com.
