President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s warning to Minsk over relay stations used in Russian attacks on Ukraine has put Belarus’s role in the war back under scrutiny. The issue is no longer only whether Belarusian territory hosts Russian military activity. It is whether Belarus has become part of the operating system that sustains Moscow’s pressure on Ukraine and NATO’s eastern flank.

Zelenskyy has said Belarus has one week to remove signal relay stations and other equipment used to support Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities. His warning, set out in reporting on the demand to dismantle the equipment, also referred to Belarusian supplies of refined oil products to Russia, which Kyiv says help Moscow absorb pressure on its fuel system.

That matters because Belarus’s role in Russia’s war has never been limited to political alignment. In 2022, Russian forces used Belarusian territory during the opening phase of the full-scale invasion. Since then, Minsk has remained tied to Moscow’s military planning, sanctions exposure and hybrid pressure against neighbouring states. The EU’s sanctions framework explicitly refers to Belarus’s support for Russia’s war against Ukraine and its involvement in hybrid attacks against EU member states.

The relay-station issue adds a technical layer to that relationship. Russian drone operations depend not only on launch sites and aircraft, but on communications, routing, electronic support, maintenance, fuel, transport and industrial supply. If Belarusian infrastructure helps Russian drones reach Ukrainian targets, it becomes part of the strike chain. A state does not have to fire the weapon to help make the attack possible.

For Ukraine, this creates a direct military problem on its northern border. Russian drone and missile attacks already force Kyiv to spread air defences across cities, energy infrastructure, logistics routes and military sites. Any support from Belarusian territory widens that burden. It also forces Ukraine to monitor a frontier that might otherwise have required fewer resources.

The same logic explains why Ukrainian military figures have begun speaking more openly about potential targets inside Belarus. Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, said in May that Ukrainian forces had identified the “first 500 targets” on Belarusian territory in the event of further escalation by Minsk. The warning, reported after Brovdi’s statement on potential targets, was not only rhetorical. It was a signal that Ukraine increasingly views Belarusian military infrastructure, support facilities and enabling systems as part of the wider Russian war machine.

That changes the deterrence equation. Belarus has tried to preserve ambiguity: close enough to Moscow to support Russia’s war, but distant enough to avoid the full consequences of direct belligerence. Kyiv’s message is that this ambiguity has limits. If Belarusian territory is used to support attacks, then the infrastructure that enables those attacks may itself become exposed.

For NATO, the risk is wider than Ukraine. Belarus borders Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Those countries already treat the Belarusian frontier as a combined security, intelligence and migration challenge. NATO has strengthened its eastern flankin response to Russia’s war, but Belarus complicates that posture because it gives Moscow depth, ambiguity and pressure points short of open confrontation with the Alliance.

The migration crisis remains part of that picture. Since 2021, Belarus has been accused of using migrants as a tool of pressure against Lithuania, Latvia and Poland. Lithuania has taken Belarus to the International Court of Justice in a case concerning the alleged smuggling of migrants, arguing that the movement of people through Belarus into Lithuania harmed its sovereignty, security and public order. For the Baltic states and Poland, migration pressure is not separate from military risk. It is one element of a broader Belarusian and Russian toolkit.

This is why the neighbours of Belarus face a multi-layered threat. Poland must manage a border exposed to migration pressure, Russian and Belarusian intelligence activity, drone risk and military exercises. Lithuania and Latvia face similar pressures, while also sitting close to the Suwałki corridor, the narrow land link between Poland and the Baltic states. Any crisis around Belarus can quickly become a NATO planning issue.

The presence of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus adds another layer. Minsk has held training connected to Russian nuclear systems, while Moscow has used the deployment to signal pressure on Europe. The military value of those weapons is not the only point. Their political function is to raise the cost of confrontation around Belarus and to complicate NATO’s escalation calculations.

Belarus now acts as a bridge between several forms of Russian pressure: conventional military support, drone infrastructure, fuel supply, nuclear signalling, migration pressure and border destabilisation. These are not isolated issues. Together, they allow Moscow to maintain pressure on Ukraine while keeping neighbouring NATO states under constant alert.

The risk for Europe is that Belarus becomes normalised as a permanent Russian forward platform. If relay stations, oil supplies, military facilities, target lists and migration pressure are treated as separate problems, the overall pattern is missed. Belarus enables Russia by providing space, infrastructure, political cover and pressure points against the West.

Zelenskyy’s warning should therefore be read as more than a message to Minsk. It is a reminder that the war against Ukraine is supported by networks outside Russia’s own territory. For NATO’s eastern members, Belarus is not a neutral neighbour caught between Moscow and Europe. It is a state whose territory, institutions and security apparatus are already embedded in Russia’s campaign against Ukraine and in the wider pressure campaign against Europe.