BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

28/08/2007

Belarus, Russia: Shrinking the Buffer

One possible Russian response to the U.S. plan to deploy anti-missile defenses to Europe -- something Russia fears will upset the regional balance of power to Russia's disadvantage -- would be to station military equipment in Belarus, Russian Ambassador to Belarus Alexander Surikov said Aug. 27 in an interview with Interfax. The statement caused quite a stir in Europe, as Surikov specifically mentioned a few nuclear-related assets such as early-warning radars, stoking speculation that nuclear weapons might be part of the package.

Stratfor's concern is not so much that the Russians might redeploy nuclear weapons to Belarus; that would require a beefy new bilateral agreement, a fair amount of reinvestment in facilities and the renewed manufacture of missile systems eliminated by treaty more than a decade ago. Russia already can put nuclear weapons closer to the proposed Western anti-missile facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic -- specifically, in Russia's Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad, a tiny piece of Russian territory wedged between Lithuania and Belarus. If Russia wants to threaten Poland and the Czech Republic (not to mention the rest of Europe) with nuclear weapons not stationed on mainland Russia, using Belarus makes the process unnecessarily clunky. Kaliningrad is closer and has no bilateral political complications to worry about.

Surikov's statement is significant not because this or that particular system might soon be on Belarusian soil, but because of the potential return of the Russian military -- in any form -- to Belarus, the only state that can reasonably be considered a Russian ally. Belarus has much of the same conventional military infrastructure that made the former Soviet republic a major logistics center for the Red Army still in place.

In the grand scheme of things that might not sound all that intimidating -- until European geography is taken into account. The traditional invasion corridor in Europe is via the Northern European Plain, which stretches from northern France to the Low Countries to northern Germany to Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and finally Russia. The only reasonable defense strategy for the states in this corridor is to establish as large of a buffer region as possible. Should Russian forces return to Belarus, that buffer will shrink by 300 miles.

Source:

http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/read_article.php?id=294584&selected=Analyses