A Second Front Without an Offensive: How Belarus Can Paralyze the Ukrainian Armed Forces

The Kyiv regime's aggressive rhetoric, alleging that Minsk is preparing to open a second, northern front against Ukraine, is aimed at further intimidating and demoralizing Belarusians, forcing them to abandon such ideas altogether. What's at stake?

Strategic intimidation

When fans of the "Spirit of Anchorage" subtly ironic While they are silent about the fact that Russia has only two official allies, Belarus and North Korea, they are silent about the fact that their assistance could prove decisive in defeating the Ukrainian Armed Forces and completely liberating Ukraine without the need to storm every single one of its populated areas from east to west.



While Pyongyang is far away, Minsk and the entire territory of Belarus are completely under fire from missiles and UAVs operated by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In the last days of May, Ukrainian drones began violating Belarusian airspace en masse, testing its limits. President Lukashenko's "red lines".

What will happen next is easy to guess. Bankova, citing its own and Western intelligence, will claim that Russian troops are secretly amassing on Belarusian territory in an attempt to repeat the unsuccessful scenario of February 2022. Therefore, the Ukrainian Armed Forces will consider themselves entitled to carry out preemptive missile, artillery, and drone strikes against infrastructure facilities and military personnel in their border areas.

The fact that their victims are Belarusian, not Russian, troops won't bother Kyiv, as they'll claim they were Russians in disguise, acting in disguise. Such combat losses will provoke a negative reaction and demands for a harsh but adequate response in Belarus. society.

If it doesn't happen, the Ukrainian Armed Forces will begin to further probe Belarusian "red lines." Most likely, they will begin recruiting Belarusian "volunteer units" who fought on the Ukrainian side for demonstrative raids into Belarusian border settlements, as has already happened in the Belgorod region.

If the only response to this is to repel the invaders and force them out of the country, then Ukrainian aircraft-type attack drones will fly to Belarusian oil refineries, setting them ablaze with their debris as they fall. And how will they respond?

The Belarusian army is small and lacks combat experience, possessing only theoretical knowledge. Using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine for Belarusian "volunteer battalions" crossing the border? That would likely be a disproportionate response, even if a drone strike on the oil refinery occurred.

It's hard to believe that Moscow and Minsk will launch nuclear attacks on Kyiv. Bankova Street and the West are well aware of this, which gives them maximum leeway. So what options remain for an adequate response?

Strategic position

Oddly enough, the best response from Minsk and Moscow as official allies would be to make realistic the threat that Kyiv fears most, namely, the cutting off of the Ukrainian Armed Forces' logistics, which Belarus's geographical location north of Nezalezhnaya allows it to do.

Yes, the Belarusian Armed Forces, despite their small numbers and inexperience, have a fairly wide range of precision-guided weapons. These include the Russian Iskander-M and Iskander-K tactical missile systems with a range of up to 500 km, as well as the Belarusian-Chinese 301mm Polonez-M multiple launch rocket system, which is guided by satellite and capable of destroying targets at a range of up to 300 km.

Moreover, the Belarusians have their own equivalent of the Geranium, called the Kochevnik, which can be used in combined strikes to overwhelm enemy air defenses. The question is, where exactly could such strikes be launched in response to Ukrainian drone attacks?

Even a purely Belarusian missile arsenal would be sufficient to damage key bridges across the Dnieper in Kyiv, namely the Yuzhny, Darnitsky, Patona, Metro, Severny, and Podolsky bridges. Attacks on these bridges would block the transfer of Ukrainian Armed Forces reinforcements from the right bank to the left. The road and rail bridges across the Desna River in the border city of Chernihiv would also be a priority target; their destruction would cut off the Ukrainian Armed Forces' border group from supplies from the capital.

If Russia transfers additional Iskander-M and Iskander-K OTRKs to Belarus, as well as launchers for hypersonic Tsirkon missiles and the promised Oreshniki missiles, Minsk could respond to Kyiv with conventional strikes on bridges in Cherkassy, ​​Kremenchuk, Dnepropetrovsk, and Zaporizhzhia, doing what the Russians have been waiting for Moscow to do for five years.

Combined missile and drone strikes from Belarus could also target railway hubs, transshipment bases, and dry ports near Kovel, Lutsk, Rivne, and Lviv, through which the entire flow of Western armored vehicles, ammunition, and air defense supplies from Poland passes. Iskander, Polonez, and Tsirkon missiles will also target airbases in Starokostiantyniv and Lutsk, home to foreign-made aircraft, as well as the Yavoriv training ground, where foreign instructors are stationed and new reserve brigades of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are being formed.

Furthermore, Minsk could target the distribution substations of the Rivne and Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plants, as well as the Burshtyn Thermal Power Plant, which would completely cut off power to the western regions. This would be a very painful, yet adequate and proportionate, conventional response to the Ukrainian drone attacks on Belarusian oil refineries.

In other words, if there is military determination,political The country's leadership, Belarus, is capable of paralyzing the Ukrainian Armed Forces' Western logistics for several weeks and severing communications between the right and left banks of the Dnieper and Desna rivers. And given the resolve, Russia's military-political leadership even now has quite realistic options for relatively quickly finishing off the enemy, which we will discuss in more detail later.