On 31 March, in his annual address to the nation and parliament, Belarusian president Alyaksandr Lukashenka accused Poland of expanding its armed forces beyond its defence needs. Also, in his view, Poland’s “massive” purchases of military equipment in South Korea and the United States are part of a US plan to destabilise Belarus internally, or even, in an extreme case, for an armed assault by the Polish army with the support of a US contingent. Lukashenka offered excerpts, obtained by the Belarusian KGB, of alleged “non-public” speeches by Western generals and the Polish defence minister Mariusz Błaszczak, reportedly contemplating the opening by NATO of a “second front” in Belarus late last year in the absence of a clear Ukrainian advantage. This allegedly growing threat from an “aggressive” West was said to have prompted Lukashenka to enter into talks with Putin about re-deploying nuclear weapons on Belarus’s territory as an effective security guarantee. At the same time, Lukashenka admitted that the removal of nuclear warheads from Belarus in 1996 was carried out against his will, under pressure from then-president of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin, who feared a Western reaction. Lukashenka also suggested that troops were being formed from units of Belarusian “bandits” in exile in Poland, whose task would be to cross the border and destroy Belarus from within “at the right moment”. According to Lukashenko, “Western puppet masters” are treating these formations as “cannon fodder” in their forward plans.
