2023-04-30 04:00:00
Dniprowske Hearing the rumble of enemy tanks, the Ukrainian soldiers blew up the bridge. It was February 24, 2022, around noon, on the first day of the Russian attack. After the border troops in Dniprowske, a small Ukrainian town on the border with Belarus, were surprised by the early-morning drone strikes, they didn’t want to take any more risks. They detonated 700 kilograms of dynamite.
More than a year later, Anton is standing at the point where the bridge was demolished, wearing a protective vest and helmet. “The Belarusians see everything we do,” grumbles the Ukrainian officer, pointing to the intact part of the bridge 100 meters away. In between are three collapsed pieces of road surface in the border river Dnieper, which is an almost insurmountable natural obstacle in this swampy area.
“There haven’t been any provocations here for months,” says Anton, who commands the small border guard unit stationed nearby: no shelling, just the occasional drone buzzing over the positions. It’s quiet on this stretch of the north front, almost eerily quiet.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to overrun Ukraine with his troops, Belarus was a central deployment area. A Ukrainian general puts the number of soldiers who invaded from the neighboring country at the beginning of 2022 at 70,000, and that of vehicles at 7,000.
Dniprovske was one of the first places to come under fire. The bridge at the site is on one of the main routes to Chernihiv, a major city in the north of the country. However, blowing up the bridge did not prevent the Russian attackers from occupying significant parts of the border region and besieging Chernihiv for weeks. The Ukrainians were only able to drive them out in April.
Ukraine continues to deploy large resources on the border with Belarus
But Kiev does not trust the calm on the border with Belarus. Observers estimate that 20,000 to 25,000 Ukrainian soldiers are still stationed along the 1,000-kilometer border.
>> Read here: How far does Belarus go in supporting Russia?
For the Ukrainians, this means that they cannot fully concentrate their forces in the embattled Donbass and have to deploy considerable resources in the north. They have mined large sections of the border and reinforced them with defensive positions. Numerous freshly dug and well camouflaged trenches are hidden in the forests of the Chernihiv region.
For security reasons, neither their locations nor Maxim’s family name may be published. The 31-year-old commands the company that has dug a circular position in the sandy soil.
The trenches are only one meter deep and 40 centimeters wide. “To reduce the area that Russian shells can hit,” explains the young commander, who worked in the construction industry before the war.
The work on the trenches is the main occupation of his men. Between shifts, the border guards sleep in reinforced but unconcreted dugouts, where wood-burning stoves spread cozy warmth.
Most of the soldiers stationed here have not yet encountered the war directly. They were mobilized to replace the more experienced comrades posted to the Donbass. It’s monotonous everyday life, but it’s much more pleasant than that of the soldiers on the Eastern Front. Not least because the men are billeted in the nearby villages and only stand in the trenches during working hours.
Belarusians, for the most part, do not want to get involved in the Ukraine war
Your mission on the northern front is: deterrence. However, little speaks for Belarus’ entry into the war, despite all the threatening gestures of the dictator Alexander Lukashenko.
Experts see this more as a ritual declaration of loyalty to Moscow and not as a sign of wanting to expose oneself to the incalculable risk of participating in the war. Apart from the fact that its military is weak with an estimated 11,000 actually operational men and suffers from a lack of personnel, Lukashenko could probably not rely on the loyalty of the troops in an emergency.
The president, who has been delegitimized since the protest against his re-election, which has been brutally suppressed since 2020, knows exactly how unpopular it would be to take part in a war of aggression. According to polls, the majority of the population supports Russia. However, they also show majorities of 65 to almost 90 percent opposed to sending Belarusian soldiers to Ukraine.
Nevertheless, Minsk is a close partner of Moscow in the war. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Lukashenko pursued an independent policy that made him one of the mediators of the Minsk agreements. Since 2022, he has almost completely sided with Moscow. Ukrainian observers speak of a “hybrid occupation” of Belarus.
Due to the latent danger on the border with Belarus, Ukraine cannot fully concentrate its troops on the embattled East.
(Photo: Reuters)
They are not the only ones who doubt that the state leadership is still making independent security policy decisions. The country has long since lost its former role as a bridge between East and West and to the Ukraine.
Lukashenko maintains the appearance of exercising political control over the Russian army presence in his country. However, his almost total dependence on Putin means that his troops use the Belarusian infrastructure at will: the military hospitals for the wounded, the training grounds for the mobilized. At the airports there are Russian fighter jets that have just fired rockets at Ukrainian cities.
Number of Russian soldiers in Belarus is falling
However, a new advance by Russian ground troops from Belarus is unlikely. Given the problems in Donbass, the Russians cannot afford a second front. In recent months they have also reduced the forces stationed in the neighboring country so much that a paper circulating among diplomats speaks of an actual “demilitarization of Belarus”.
Of the more than 10,000 soldiers stationed there, only 4,000 remain. Moscow also recently withdrew its MiG-31K fighter jets, which can fire guided missiles such as the Kinzhal missile.
Russia and Belarus are close allies, but Belarus’ entry into the war seems unlikely.
(Photo: IMAGO/SNA)
However, these measures are not a sign of de-escalation: the stationing of tactical nuclear weapons announced by Putin by the summer caused tensions to rise again. If the move is implemented, it is likely to have a defensive rather than an offensive character from a Russian perspective.
Assessing the latent threat from Belarus is not always easy for the Ukrainians. In December, Chief of Staff Valeri Zalushni said the capital could be attacked again from the north. Remarkably, the head of military intelligence publicly contradicted him at the time. Kirilo Budanov described the Russian maneuvers in the neighboring country as part of a disinformation campaign that does not pose an immediate threat.
>> Read here: Stationing of nuclear weapons in Belarus: “The target for a Russian nuclear strike would be Poland”
Meanwhile, Ukraine is doing everything it can politically to avoid an escalation and not to drive its neighbors even further into Moscow’s arms. Kiev may direct harsh words at Minsk and annoy the opposing soldiers at the border with obscene gestures or flags of the Belarusian opposition.
At the same time, however, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has denied the Belarusian opposition any public support and is holding back on calls for all Western sanctions against Moscow to be extended to Minsk.
This strategic restraint was exemplified by an incident in late December when a Ukrainian S-300 anti-missile accidentally landed on Belarusian territory, similar to what happened in Poland a few weeks earlier. Both Minsk and Kyiv appeased, with high-level meetings held behind the scenes. Finally, the delicate affair was buried with the announcement of a joint investigative commission that has been working quietly ever since.
The number of Russian soldiers stationed in Belarus has recently fallen.
(Photo: AP)
Nevertheless, the border guard officer Anton knows how quickly things can go wrong. The drone strikes of February 24, 2022, when “suddenly everything exploded”, remain in his mind. He believes the Russians are capable of anything: “We have to expect that they will attack exactly where we least expect it.”
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Nevertheless, Anton calmly turns his back on the Belarusians on the bridge and walks to the nearby border post, which is deserted. Time has stood still here: the walls are hung with calendars marking the day of the attack, the day officials fled Russian shelling.
Later, the invaders looted the premises. They took away computers and phones, but what’s left are a few old rotary dials. Shards of broken glass, torn documents and cups of dried coffee lie on the floor of the booths where passports were checked.
“That’s a bit sad,” says Anton, who started his career here and then worked for many years. “There used to be life everywhere here.” Before the war there was a brisk small border traffic, now all borders are closed. “We also knew our colleagues from the other side well.” So they exchanged views on combating illegal migration and suspicious people reported to each other.
Even without actual acts of war, this everyday exchange is now unthinkable for many years. Even after a peace agreement, the border is likely to remain insurmountable for a long time – due to mines, soldiers and mistrust.
Without a bridge, the once busy border post has lost its purpose. It becomes a spooky memorial. “At some point it will look like Chernobyl here,” says one soldier, “everything overgrown and deserted.”
More: “Lukashenko becomes a henchman”: Does Putin now want to annex Belarus?
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