Why Ukraine has Abandoned Four Years of Caution over Belarus
In a departure from its previous policy of non-provocation, Ukraine has issued a public ultimatum to Belarus, demanding the dismantling of relay stations in the Gomel and Brest regions that assist Russian Shahed drones. President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Ukraine would destroy the equipment if
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Belarus is almost certainly not about to join the war on Russia’s side. Western military analysts see no sign of the troop build-up a real invasion would need, and Belarus’s own defense minister, Viktor Khrenin, has said openly that it would make “no sense” for his country to attack a neighbor unprovoked.
Ukraine has accused Belarus of hosting relay equipment capable of helping to guide Russian drone strikes, and has threatened to remove it by force if Minsk does not act.
The more revealing question is why Ukraine now feels strong enough to issue a public ultimatum to a country it spent four years carefully not provoking, just as the United States is warming to the man running it.
The row over aiding Russian drone attacks from Belarusian soil is only the visible part of a much bigger story.
Underneath the headlines about retransmitters sits a contest over what Belarus becomes once the war ends, and who gets to decide that. At its core, this is about Ukraine beginning to think beyond the war itself and about its role as a regional security actor in the settlement that follows.
Kyiv is increasingly alarmed that others, from Washington to Moscow, are already trying to shape Belarus’s future, while it will be the country left living with the consequences, above all in the form of an exposed northern border if Belarus remains a platform for Russian power.
The war in Ukraine has forced Britain and the rest of Europe to take its defense spending seriously.
The equipment at the heart of a four-year fiction
On June 19, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko one week to dismantle relay stations installed on Belarusian territory. According to Kyiv, these retransmitters act as signal boosters mounted on communications towers in Belarus’s Gomel and Brest regions, helping Russian Shahed drones navigate and loate their targets once they cross into Ukrainian airspace.
“If he does not remove them, we will remove everything ourselves,” Zelenskyy said. By June 24, he told reporters that “the equipment stopped working on June 22,” adding that “we still need to verify whether it was dismantled or simply switched off.” Minsk has not officially confirmed anything either way, though Ukrainian border guards reported a reduction in Shahed drone incursions via Chernihiv region from June 24 onward.
For four years, Lukashenko has pushed the narrative that he is the man keeping Belarus out of the war, even as he lets Russian troops use his country, hosts Russian weapons on his soil, and facilitates the logistics of Moscow’s campaign.
Zelensky has now gone further, warning that Ukraine is adding the Mozyr oil refinery to its potential target set and accusing Minsk of materially sustaining Russia’s war effort. He has pointed to a thirteenfold increase in Belarusian gasoline exports to Russia since January as evidence that Belarus is helping to fuel Russian military operations.
Kyiv also cites Belarus’s role in repairing Russian equipment, providing training grounds, allowing missile launches and drone operations from its territory, enabling the transit of troops and equipment, and hosting Russia’s nuclear forces.
The change that started in Zelensky’s own office
Ukraine’s new willingness to confront Lukashenko traces back to a personnel change. For most of the war, Ukraine’s policy on Belarus had the goal of avoiding doing anything that might push Lukashenko further into Russia’s arms.
That meant keeping the exiled Belarusian opposition, led by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, at arm’s length. The man widely seen as the chief obstacle to warmer ties with her was Andriy Yermak, head of Zelensky’s presidential office.
Yermak resigned in November 2025 amid a corruption scandal. In January, Zelensky replaced him with Kyrylo Budanov, his military intelligence chief, who had already been active on the Belarus angle, including arranging the release of more than a hundred Belarusian political prisoners the previous month.
The shift in policy followed almost immediately. Zelensky met Tsikhanouskaya for the first time in January, hosted her in Kyiv in May, and in February imposed Ukraine’s first personal sanctions on Lukashenko.
What Ukraine is actually trying to achieve
One explanation for Ukraine’s immediate tougher stance is confidence: the old fear of a Belarusian army pouring across the border now looks overblown, while Ukraine’s own drones can strike anywhere inside Belarus (its drone forces commander has said Kyiv has already mapped 500 potential targets there).
But there are other reasons. One is that Ukraine fears that Russia is dragging Lukashenko deeper into the war. According to The Wall Street Journal, citing current and former European and Russian officials, Moscow has stepped up pressure on Belarus this year to expand the use of its territory for drone strikes against Ukraine, force Kyiv to divert troops from Donbas, and support operations against NATO countries bordering Belarus.
Another reason is to stop Lukashenko being rehabilitated by the West while Belarus still helps Russia fight.
The US has spent the past year trading sanctions relief for prisoner releases. Belarus freed 123 political prisoners in December in exchange for eased sanctions, another 250 in March, and was folded into US President Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace soon after. Trump has even spoken to Lukashenko by phone and called him “highly respected,” language no other Western leader uses about him.
There is now talk of the US reopening its embassy in Minsk and even of a possible Lukashenko visit to the White House. For Ukraine, this is alarming because it risks legitimizing a regime that continues to aid Russia’s war effort, weakening pressure on Minsk at precisely the moment Kyiv is trying to expose and constrain Belarus’s role in the conflict.
The second goal is to stop that same softening spreading to the EU, which has so far been far more cautious than the US. This includes Poland, particularly as developments such as the release of Polish journalist Andrzej Poczobut and a relative easing of tensions along the Belarus–Poland border could encourage Warsaw to reconsider its hard line toward Minsk.
The third, and the broadest, is for Ukraine to position itself as the region’s leading security actor, setting the terms on Belarus rather than waiting for the US or Europe to decide.
Ukraine’s approach is about signaling that aiding Russia carries a cost while reminding others that Belarus should not be treated simply as an extension of Russia.
Lukashenko’s shrinking room to maneuver
All of this squeezes Lukashenko into an increasingly narrow space. His public message is peace, sovereignty and staying out of the war, but his real position is dependency on Moscow, complicity in its war effort, and fear of both his neighbors.
His preferred strategy is to give Kyiv just enough to avoid Ukrainian strikes, give Moscow just enough to avoid Russian pressure, and give Washington just enough on prisoners to keep sanctions relief flowing. That is a narrow corridor to walk, and it keeps getting narrower.
He tried to implement the Ukraine part of this strategy in his mid-June interview with the Saudi-owned channel Al Arabiya, in which he said, “We are not going to fight in Ukraine,” adding that Belarus “cannot afford another war” and describing his own country as militarily vulnerable. Zelensky’s response was that Lukashenko could keep his apology, since his words had meant nothing since the war’s first day.
Why this matters beyond Belarus
Poland and the Baltic states are watching closely. Belarusian territory is the most plausible launchpad for any future pressure on them, whether through drone incursions, weaponized migration of the kind already used against Poland’s border, or worse.
Warsaw shut its entire border with Belarus in September over a Russian-Belarusian military exercise and a string of drones crossing in from Belarusian airspace. That same exposure explains why Poland and the Baltics are uneasy about Washington’s outreach to Lukashenko: it risks rewarding him without changing anything on the ground, leaving the frontline states to live with the consequences.
The contest that remains
None of this means Belarus can be talked out of Russia’s orbit. Lukashenko’s dependence on the Kremlin is structural, not a passing mood, and no amount of Western hope will change that on its own.
Belarus cannot be pulled out of Russia’s orbit by wishful thinking. But it can be kept from disappearing fully into it. That is now one of the strategic contests of this war.
