The Belarusian Defense Ministry announced mobilization exercises near Minsk.
“A mobilization exercise is being held from June 21 to 30, 2023 with military commissariats in the Minsk region”, the military department said.
The Defense Ministry explained that exercises are held every year in a planned manner. Their purpose is to assess the readiness of state agencies and military registration and enlistment offices to perform the task of mobilization. Within the framework of the exercise it is planned to carry out activities to deploy infrastructure facilities and attract conscripts and vehicles “in the interests of staffing the military registration and enlistment offices”.
On June 20, President Aleksandr Lukashenko met with the foreign ministers of the CSTO countries. “On the western flank of the CSTO, if I may say so, real military threats to security have formed, unfortunately for us and for Russia (because it is our area of responsibility). They are very serious, more serious than anywhere else. There is no peace in the Transcaucasus and Central Asia (it will get worse)”, he said at the meeting (quoted by BelTA).
The Times newspaper wrote the day before that hundreds of citizens of Belarus, who fled the country after the mass protests in 2020, are trained in Poland to overthrow Lukashenko. As it was reported, training is held by former officers of the Belarusian security forces from the organization BYPOL, who were also forced to leave their country. Some citizens of Belarus have been undergoing training for months, said the leader of the organization, Aleksandr Azarov.
Colonel of the Border Guard Service Arkadysh Tyvonyuk told RFM radio station that Belarus opened fire at the territory of Poland for the first time. According to him, a service car with two border guards was shot. No one was injured.
In early June, Lukashenko met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then the Belarusian president said that “the West is preparing a scenario of power change in Belarus”. According to him, Western countries are training “members of illegal armed groups” in Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine in order to hold a coup d’etat.
