Ukraine’s president says Russia is preparing to turn Belarus into a launchpad for heavier attacks on the country’s west — and he is asking a question with no comfortable answer: what does it mean if Moscow stations ballistic missiles on the territory of a country that is not officially at war?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy made the warning on Saturday, in audio comments to journalists. Russia, he said, is already placing relay stations on Belarusian territory to guide its drones into western Ukraine — and President Vladimir Putin now wants the approval of Belarus’s authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, to deploy ballistic missiles there too.
“Is there a threat of strikes and an increase in attacks on the western part of our country? Absolutely. Is Russia preparing for this? I think so,” Zelenskyy said.
“Because we know that they are placing relay stations on Belarusian territory to use this corridor for drones and intensify the attacks. But that’s not enough for them: they need Lukashenko’s support so that other types of weapons, including ballistic missiles, can be deployed on Belarusian territory.”
The relay stations are not a new rumor. Andrii Demchenko, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service, has separately reported that equipment based in Belarus helps relay or amplify the signals of Russian Shahed and Geran attack drones — the Iranian-designed loitering munitions that have become Moscow’s weapon of choice — as they fly toward western Ukraine and toward the Polish border region.
The ballistic missile claim carries more weight because of what Kyiv says is already there. In September, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Oleh Ivashchenko, said units of Russia’s 101st Missile Brigade — equipped with the Oreshnik, Russia’s new intermediate-range ballistic missile system — had been deployed to Belarus. The Oreshnik drew global attention when Russia first fired it at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro in late 2024.
Western Ukraine matters because it has been the country’s relative sanctuary. Far from the front lines in the east and south, cities like Lviv have absorbed hundreds of thousands of displaced people and businesses. They also sit on the logistics corridors that carry Western military aid into the country. But “relative” is doing a lot of work in that sentence: in recent days, Russian attacks have struck communities across Volyn, Rivne and Lviv oblasts, killing and injuring civilians, damaging infrastructure and knocking out power.
A warning wrapped in a wider escalation
Zelenskyy used the same briefing to draw a hard line on a separate front: the campaign against Russia’s oil refineries. He told the Financial Times this week that Kyiv was done holding back. “The block [on attacking refineries] is out. We’re done,” he said — accusing Moscow of ignoring the so-called energy ceasefire that US President Donald Trump announced on October 11, under which both sides were supposed to stop hitting each other’s energy infrastructure.
The numbers back up the complaint, at least on Ukraine’s side of the ledger. Reuters reported that Russia’s Ryazan refinery — owned by state oil major Rosneft, supplying fuel to Moscow and accounting for nearly five percent of Russia’s refinery throughput — was forced to halt one of its main crude distillation units after a Ukrainian drone attack on October 15. Meanwhile, Russia’s own strikes on Ukraine’s power grid have continued unabated, knocking out electricity for more than a million people.
Kyiv’s answer to both threats, Zelenskyy said, is more air defense — distributed according to where the strikes are heaviest, and backed by expanded production of defensive gun turrets designed to shoot down jet-powered drones, a growing problem as Russia fields faster Shahed variants. The interceptor problem is real: Ukraine has acknowledged that its drone interceptors are capped at speeds too low to catch Russia’s jet-powered attack drones.
Why this matters
Belarus has been Russia’s silent partner since the full-scale invasion began — Russian troops poured across the Belarusian border toward Kyiv in February 2022 — but it has never formally joined the war. Stationing ballistic missiles on Belarusian soil would drag Minsk across a line Lukashenko has spent four years tiptoeing around, and Zelenskyy said so directly: “This is a direct involvement of Belarus in this war, and, in my opinion, very dangerous. And, of course, for Belarus too.”
For the rest of Europe, the warning lands alongside an uncomfortable geography. Belarus borders three NATO members — Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Drone relay stations that amplify signals toward western Ukraine can just as easily serve corridors pointed at NATO territory, a fact Kyiv’s border guards have already flagged. Whether Putin is bluffing, testing Lukashenko, or genuinely preparing a new strike corridor, the effect is the same: the map of the war is being redrawn northward, and Ukraine’s western sanctuary is getting smaller.
The refinery campaign, meanwhile, is where Zelenskyy’s patience with Washington visibly snapped. Kyiv paused its refinery strikes for three days at the White House’s request — and watched Russia keep bombing Ukrainian power plants. “We’re done,” he said. The energy ceasefire is over in everything but name. What replaces it is a winter both sides intend to fight in the dark.
