Quote:
Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist
Russia's biggest fear at this point is NATO involvement. Wagner is Russian and and aggression in Polish territory would trigger article 5. Lukashenko knows he'd be finished if that happened.
This is intended to drive fear in the west of an escalation.
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I don't think so. Quite the contrary.
Military exercises mostly happen near borders, because that's where conflicts mostly happen. In Belarus there are five borders to choose from: Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian. Out of those five choices, the Polish border has
by far the least amount of political implication and military threat attached to it, despite some of the recent news. For scale, the Belarussian military budget is around 3% of that of the Polish military, and Poland has something like three times the manpower, much of it already focused on the Belarussian border. If there was a genuine intent to threaten escalation with the placement of these exercises, the threat would be placed at Latvian, Lithuanian or Ukrainian borders, not Poland.
If there is a political message with these exercises, it's that "Belarus is preparing itself against a western invasion", not "Belarus/Russia is threatening to escalate".
The real implication of these exercises is the implication that Wagner is being integrated into the Belarussian military structure. This is significant in two ways;
First, it's just a pretty big deal for Belarussian military strength. while I'm not sure of the exact numbers, the Wagner forces are in the ballpark in size as the Belarussian ground forces, or in any case a really significant addition proportionally, so adding Wagner to Belarussian forces makes much more of a difference in hypothetical military power than retracting them from the Russian side did. (I'm saying hypothetical because as we've seen, mercenaries aren't always reliable.)
Second issue is the impact this has in Belarussian power structure. If we assume Wagner is now under Belarussian command, that means Belarussian president Lukashenka now has an army of mercenaries backing him. Lukashenka's hold on power has been considered rather fragile ever since he cheated his way to an election win back in 2020, and there has been quite a lot of speculation that if Lukashenka was to try to order his forces to attack Ukraine, there's a good chance this would only lead to the military removing him from power. Adding Wagner troops to this equation changes everything. Of course there's no guarantee that Prigozhin would necessarily back Lukashenka, but the threat of that happening is likely to keep Belarussian internal resistance in check at least in the short term.
(In the long term bringing a mercenary army of Wagner's size into Belarus seems like a terrible idea for Belarus, especially when it's impossible to know where the loyalties of that army actually lies on any given day.)