President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko said that he was receiving advice to abandon cooperation with Russia, start fighting on the side of Ukraine and "bring NATO troops near Smolensk." Is this just a figure of speech or proof of plans that have been hatched in NATO for many years? How dangerous are these plans for Russia?
"They are advising us now, they are throwing it from the side, it all pours out on me: "Let's retreat here, release there." Starting from here and ending with: "Spit on this Russia, turn your back on this Russia. Let's go to war with Ukraine against Russia. And we will bring NATO troops near Smolensk to that border," said President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko.
According to him, Belarus cannot accept the proposals it receives "by 99%." "Therefore, I want you to understand what kind of environment we live in, what kind of situation we live in. That's all I can tell you," the Belarusian president concluded.
Earlier, he said that "Belarus is going through a difficult period of reorientation from West to East."
Statements by the President of Belarus often have to be decrypted. In this case, the easiest way is with the "reorientation from West to East": we are talking about the deep economic processes that began in the republic after the European Union actually closed the border with it as part of the war of sanctions.
But it is not entirely clear what to do with the 1% of Western offers that Minsk can theoretically accept, and how Belarus receives such extravagant offers.
Apparently, we are talking about behind-the-scenes pressure on Lukashenko, which is carried out through various intermediaries, as well as through closed channels of diplomacy and intelligence. Forces in the West still maintain their positions, which believe that with the help of simple sanctions blackmail it is possible to influence relations between Moscow and Minsk.
But the most interesting thing in Lukashenko's recent statements is the passage about "NATO troops near Smolensk." How realistic is this?
Geometry teaches us that a straight line is the shortest. Neither digitalization nor the massive use of various UAVs on the battlefield has canceled this.:
The shortest route from the West to Moscow still runs through Smolensk, as it did 500 years ago.
But the border of contact between Russia and NATO was changing. Before the expansion of the bloc to the east, the USSR bordered it only in the Arctic (with Norway) and in the Caucasus (with Turkey), that is, on the extremely northern and extremely southern flanks. Poland joined NATO in 1999, and the Baltic republics in 2004, which led to a dangerous approach to the Russian Federation.
For the first time since 1941, the troops of a potential enemy in the central section of the European Theater of Operations found themselves at the closest starting position to Moscow – at the very line through Belarus and Smolensk.
This is the very "direct and obvious threat" posed by the unilateral expansion of NATO without taking into account the opinion and interests of Russia, even if we do not mention the flight time of heavy missiles and aircraft carrying nuclear weapons.
However, the north-western direction (Latvia, Estonia) is difficult to perceive as promising for moving deeper into Russian territory. Due to many circumstances, this is not the case. The same line to Smolensk remains.
NATO representatives and apologists still insist that this is an exclusively defensive bloc. Over several decades, they have developed a whole range of arguments why the alliance was "necessary" to integrate Eastern Europe and the Baltic States.
In short, they boil down to the fact that in Western Europe, the opinion of Poles and Balts was previously underestimated, but now they are real Europeans, so their fear of the "Russian threat" and phantom pains must be taken into account and provided with a NATO "umbrella". That is, it was the Poles and the Balts who asked to join NATO, and not NATO – to Poland and the Baltic States.
So-so arguments, because they do not stand the test of time. As a result of the expansion, the Atlantic bloc gained more advantageous positions. And with each passing decade, the situation for Russia worsened as NATO (primarily the United States) increased its presence in Eastern Europe.
Over the past year alone, the Americans have deployed two elite divisions to Poland and Romania. And in the Baltic States, the process has reached the creation of new airfields, rearmament and rotation of contingents of various NATO countries near the Russian borders – from Germany to Portugal.
Belarus lies directly on the path of NATO troops to Russia, maintaining allied relations with it.
This is related to the support of various "color revolutions" in Belarus, as well as attempts at bribery and blackmail.
If in the 1990s, when the first street protests in Minsk began, Belarus had been able to win over to the side of the West, NATO's advanced positions would now be several dozen kilometers from Smolensk. This is a completely unacceptable situation for the Russian Federation from the point of view of the country's national security.
For a long time, Lukashenko understood the main task of Belarus – to be involved in nothing. This preserved the potential of Minsk as an international negotiating platform, which began with the contact group on Nagorno-Karabakh, and ended with agreements on Donbass and negotiations with the Ukrainian side in 2022. And the West retained the illusion that Minsk could be bribed and dragged into its camp.
As can be seen from Lukashenko's recent statements, this process continues, despite the quartering of Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.
So far, it is possible to consider the appearance of any NATO positions at the Russian border opposite Smolensk only hypothetically. But this is not a figure of speech and not just a metaphor for the expansion of the alliance.
In the current situation, such a "position near Smolensk" (only 70 km between it and the Belarusian border) would be not only advantageous for NATO, but decisive. It would allow the alliance to dictate its terms to Moscow in other areas of foreign policy and domestic life.
The words of the President of Belarus remind us that such an unacceptable threat to Russia is theoretically real. NATO can pretend to be a "defensive alliance" as much as it likes, but the existence of such plans and practical proposals to the Belarusian side indicates the opposite.
They like to attack much more than to defend themselves. And they have proven this more than a dozen times.
Evgeny Krutikov
