MINSK, 26 August (BelTA) – NATO organizes up to 50 exercises near Belarusian borders every year. The military analyst Igor Chibisov made the statement for the newspaper SB. Belarus Segodnya, BelTA has learned.
According to the source, NATO is concentrating forces near the borders of Belarus and Russia while Belarus does nothing of the kind. The analyst reminded that a U.S. army battalion was deployed in the exercise area Pabrade 15km away from the Belarusian border in October 2019. The battalion can reach the Belarusian border within 10-15 minutes. It has a lot of hardware: 30 Abrams tanks, 25 Bradley fighting vehicles, and 70 wheeled trucks. It allows one to conclude that the situation in the European region cannot be described as calm. Moreover, tanks have never been viewed as a weapon of defense, Igor Chibisov noted. The situation is not critical but surely it will not contribute to peace in the region, he added.
The analyst noted that the organization of a large-scale exercise near the border and the launch of a genuine offensive during the exercise is one of the ways to start a war. “We saw in Libya, Yugoslavia, and Iran that it is always possible to find a reason for a war. This is why the commander-in-chief of the Belarusian army made an adequate decision in favor of organizing a Belarusian army exercise in the western direction and the southwestern one,” Igor Chibisov noted. “The USA and its European partners organize up to 50 various exercises near Belarusian borders every year. But our country is a sovereign and independent state. One wonders whether the Baltic states and Poland are really independent if NATO troops and American bases have been deployed in these countries for many years. Yes, there are two Russian military bases in Belarus but those have been here since the days of the Soviet Union and are not designed for offensive operations. By the way, an agreement was reached after the USSR collapse that no foreign military bases and NATO troops will be deployed in the territory of the former socialist countries. It is another serious reason to think about things.”
