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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
Journalists created an interactive map with 150 Belarusian military facilities — centers of potential military threat to Ukraine from the northern direction. These include depots, airfields, military units, and “sleeping” former Soviet bases.
Reporters from the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty project Schemes, together with colleagues from the Belarusian Service, created the map based on analysis of satellite images and open-source data. It includes 150 key military locations.
Among the selected sites are air bases and airfields (including those that Russian aviation actively used at the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022), ammunition and fuel depots, permanent stationing locations of military units, border guard detachments, training centers, and firing ranges.
The authors paid special attention to abandoned Soviet bases. These are a potential infrastructural reserve that the regime of Alexander Lukashenko and the command of the Russian Armed Forces could quickly reactivate to host new units or missile systems, including ballistic ones.
In the future, the map will be supplemented with new military sites — as centers of potential military threat to Ukraine from the northern border.
The Belarusian army is not taking direct part in combat operations on Ukrainian territory, but since the start of the full-scale invasion the republic’s territory has served as a springboard for Russian attacks. In addition, so-called “filtration camps” operated in Belarus. Journalists established the location of one of them — where Russian military detained and tortured Ukrainians in the spring of 2022 before deporting them to Russia.
Throughout this spring and summer, Volodymyr Zelensky repeatedly emphasized that Russia continues to incite Belarus to war. The Belarusian authoritarian leader insisted there would be no attack from the Republic of Belarus. Belarusian opposition estimates the likelihood of Alexander Lukashenko’s regime directly entering the war against Ukraine on Russia’s side as high.
