ANALYSIS: Belarus, an Armed Vassal: The Springboard for the Russian Threat in the East

Sabotage, Cables, Pipelines—The War That Dares Not Speak Its Name

Since 2022, NATO’s eastern flank has been the scene of an intense hybrid war. Submarine cables connecting the Baltic states to Scandinavia have been repeatedly damaged. Pipelines have been sabotaged. Power grids have been the target of cyberattacks. Trains carrying military equipment have experienced unexplained disruptions. Taken individually, each of these incidents can be denied. Together, they paint a coherent picture of a coordinated destabilization campaign.

Attributing these acts to Russia or its proxies is often impossible to prove publicly—which is precisely the advantage of hybrid warfare. It creates fear, uncertainty, and economic costs—without crossing the threshold that would trigger a formal military response from NATO. It is a strategy of asymmetric costs: it costs Russia little to carry out these actions, but it costs the targeted countries a great deal to respond to them and protect themselves.

Political Infiltration and Networks of Influence

The least visible but perhaps most insidious aspect of the Russian hybrid threat in Europe is that of political influence networks. Political parties in several EU countries receive—or have received—direct or indirect Russian funding. Media personalities promote pro-Russian narratives. Influence operations on social media seek to amplify internal political divisions.

These operations have a specific goal: to weaken the political will of Western democracies to maintain their support for Ukraine and increase their defense spending. They are part of Russia’s “information warfare” doctrine, which views the media and political spheres as battlefields on par with the military theater. And Russia is investing heavily in this arena.

Hybrid warfare is the most difficult to combat because it has no visible front line. It is waged on servers, in bought-off newsrooms, and through opaque political financing. And the West, with its press freedoms and open democracies, is structurally vulnerable. That is not a reason to give up these freedoms. It is a reason to defend them with greater vigilance.

Multinational Battle Groups: Insufficient but Present

NATO has deployed multinational battle groups in the Baltic states and Poland since 2017, with reinforcements arriving after 2022. These units typically consist of between 1,000 and 1,500 soldiers each—a symbolic presence rather than one that is militarily sufficient to halt a large-scale Russian attack. But their role is that of a tripwire: attacking these forces means attacking American, British, German, and French soldiers—which would automatically trigger Article 5.

The debate within the Alliance centers on the scale of these deployments. Influential military voices, particularly at SHAPE (the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe), are calling for these battle groups to be elevated to the level of permanent brigades or army corps. The Ankara summit could formalize some of these reinforcements. The key issue is their permanence: rotational forces—which rotate every six months—do not provide the same defensive capabilities as forces permanently pre-positioned in the region.

Air Defense Systems: The Top Priority

Faced with missiles and drones from Kaliningrad, air defense is the top priority for the Baltic states and Poland. Poland has ordered Patriot systems and F-35s in considerable quantities. The Baltic states, with more limited industrial capabilities, rely more heavily on allied deployments. The challenge lies in coverage: the Baltic airspace is small but complex, and the threat includes slow, low-altitude drones that can evade detection by some conventional radars.

Lessons from the war in Ukraine have been learned: defending against drones requires specific low-altitude systems—not just Patriots for ballistic missiles, but also directed-energy weapons, anti-drone cannons, and electronic warfare systems that jam the communications of drone swarms. These capabilities are currently being developed and rapidly deployed in the countries on the Eastern Flank.

NATO has learned from Ukraine. Finally. Four years of observing Russian tactics—drones, cruise missiles, hybrid attacks—have been translated into equipment orders and defense doctrines. Slowly, too slowly, but it’s a step in the right direction.

A Political Signal Ahead of the Ankara Summit

The Gdansk Declaration, signed on June 25, 2026, by several European leaders meeting in Poland, sends a clear political signal ahead of the Ankara summit. It reaffirms the goal of spending 5% of GDP on defense and strengthening the eastern flank as top priorities. It also places Poland—the host country of the meeting and the EU’s leading defense investor as a share of GDP—at the center of Europe’s collective defense framework.

Poland currently spends about 4% of its GDP on defense, which puts it ahead of virtually all of its European allies. It has ordered dozens of South Korean K2 tanks, hundreds of HIMARS missiles, F-35s, and K9 self-propelled howitzers. It is becoming the largest conventional military power in continental Europe, excluding nuclear capabilities. Warsaw embraces this role fully and with pride.

Poland’s Military Identity as a Driving Force Behind European Defense

Poland’s historical memory—divided between two occupations, the Nazi and the Soviet—has shaped a national defense posture that few countries can emulate. Poles do not need to convince their public that the Russian threat is real. They have lived through it. This collective consciousness translates into high military spending, an expanding reserve force, and a political will for defense that has no equivalent in Western Europe.

This Polish energy is now fueling debates within NATO. Warsaw is urging its allies to take the Russian threat seriously, to maintain their support for Ukraine, and to strengthen the eastern flank. The Gdańsk Declaration would not have come about without the Polish initiative. Poland is an emerging power in the European security architecture.

Poland is becoming the country that Europe needs most right now: a country that is afraid, that does not forget, and that truly spends on its defense. The lesson for other Europeans is simple: fear of history is the best defense budget.

The Belarusian People Caught in a Vice

The Belarusian people are perhaps the most forgotten victims of the Lukashenko-Putin alliance. Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians have fled their country since 2020, with a large proportion heading to Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. Those who have remained live under intense state surveillance, facing arbitrary arrests for any expression of dissent.

The regime is holding the population hostage: any sign of dissent—even a flower laid at a monument, even a social media post—can lead to imprisonment. Thousands of political prisoners remain detained under conditions that human rights organizations describe as torture. This reality receives less media coverage than the war in Ukraine, but it is no less serious.

Belarusians Fighting for Ukraine

There is an often-overlooked aspect of the conflict: thousands of Belarusians are fighting alongside Ukrainian forces, often organized into units such as the Kastous Kalinouski Regiment—a unit of pro-democracy Belarusian volunteers fighting for Ukraine’s freedom and, they hope, for the eventual liberation of Belarus.

This human dimension—citizens of a vassal state fighting against the occupier of their own nation—is one of the most poignant stories of this war. It illustrates that the ongoing battle is not simply a territorial war between states. It is a conflict between worldviews: freedom versus authoritarianism, self-determination versus forced vassalage.

The Belarusian fighters in Ukraine move me deeply. They did not wait for their country to be free to fight for freedom. They chose the only fight available to them—defending Ukraine—in the hope that their victory will pave the way for their own. It is a kind of courage I could never emulate.

The Use of Migration as a Weapon

Russia and Belarus have used migration flows as a tool of destabilization against countries on the Eastern flank. In 2021, Lukashenko orchestrated a deliberate migration crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, transporting migrants from the Middle East to the EU border to exert political and humanitarian pressure on Warsaw and Brussels. This method is enshrined in Russian hybrid doctrine as a low-cost tool for exerting pressure.

In June 2026, intelligence reports indicate new preparations in this area. Charter flights from third countries to Minsk, accumulations of migrants at border crossings, and communications between Belarusian agencies and smuggling networks—all these are signs that Russia and Belarus are maintaining this capacity for migration-based destabilization as an option available at any time.

The Response of the Eastern Flank Countries

Poland has built a physical barrier along its border with Belarus, funded in part by the EU. Lithuania and Latvia have done the same. These structures have been controversial from a humanitarian standpoint—people have lost their lives while attempting to cross these borders. But their deterrent effect is real: the massive migration flows orchestrated from Minsk have decreased significantly since the completion of these barriers.

This reality illustrates the cruel nature of hybrid warfare: defensive measures come at a real humanitarian cost. Protecting the eastern flank’s borders against the exploitation of migration involves difficult decisions regarding the right to asylum, the treatment of those seeking protection, and international humanitarian principles. These are tensions that liberal democracies must manage—without ignoring them, but without allowing themselves to be paralyzed by them.

The Polish-Belarusian border is a metaphor for this entire war: a wall that no one wanted to build, to protect against an aggression that no one wanted to believe was possible. Hybrid warfare forces impossible choices. This is one of them.

What the Alliance Can Do—and What It Cannot

NATO can strengthen the defense of its eastern flank in the face of the threat posed by Belarus as a Russian platform. It can deploy more troops, improve its air defense systems, and conduct visible deterrence exercises. What it cannot do is liberate Belarus from Russian political occupation—that is a matter of internal political transformation that only the Belarusian people can achieve, when conditions permit.

It is important to recognize this limitation. The Alliance must not allow itself to be drawn into rhetoric about “liberating Belarus,” which would be either meaningless or dangerously escalatory. It must focus on what it can control: the robustness of its own defenses, the credibility of its deterrence, and maintaining economic pressure on the Belarusian regime through sanctions.

Sanctions against Belarus—an incomplete but necessary tool

The European Union has maintained sanctions against the Lukashenko regime since the 2020 crackdown. These sanctions have had real economic effects on the Belarusian political elite, but they have not been sufficient to bring about regime change. Moscow offset the economic pressures by providing direct financial support to Minsk. This dynamic creates a structural limitation to the sanctions: they cannot, on their own, win an economic standoff that Russia is willing to pay for.

Nevertheless, sanctions remain necessary. They impose a cost on the regime, signal a refusal to recognize its legitimacy, and provide moral support to Belarusian civil society as it resists under extremely difficult conditions. Abandoning sanctions would send a disastrous signal to all authoritarian regimes: repress your people brutally enough, and the West will eventually come to terms with it.

Sanctions against Lukashenko do not topple him. But they remind him every day that he is Europe’s pariah. And for someone who still considered himself the legitimate president in 2020, this reminder carries weight. International contempt is also a form of pressure.

A Structural Threat, Not a Temporary One

The threat posed by Belarus as a Russian platform to NATO’s eastern flank is not cyclical—it will not disappear with a change in the diplomatic calendar. It is structural. As long as Lukashenko remains in power with Moscow’s support, as long as Russian forces can be stationed freely on Belarusian soil, and as long as Russian tactical nuclear missiles are deployed in Minsk, NATO’s eastern flank will remain under direct pressure.

The response must be commensurate with this enduring threat. The reinforcement of the eastern flank, announced in the Gdańsk Declaration and expected in Ankara, must also be structural—not rotations lasting a few months, but permanent presences, robust infrastructure, and integrated air defense systems. That is what credible deterrence is: a presence that tells Moscow that any aggression will be repelled, immediately and at the highest possible cost.

What the West Must Do, Regardless of Whether Ukraine Is Liberated or Not

Even in a scenario where the war in Ukraine ends favorably—through a ceasefire, territorial liberation, or negotiations—the Belarusian threat will persist. Belarus under Lukashenko will remain a Russian satellite. The missiles will remain. Access to NATO’s borders will remain. The West cannot rely on a resolution of the Ukrainian crisis to solve the problem of its eastern flank. The two issues must be addressed in parallel, with different time horizons but a shared strategic coherence.

Russia is playing a game of geography. NATO must play the same game with greater clarity, greater consistency, and greater institutional courage. Belarus is the springboard for the Russian threat in the East. It is up to the Alliance to render this springboard unusable—through deterrence, defense, and constant support for the forces within Belarus itself that aspire to freedom.

The Belarusian springboard will not disappear through mere declarations. It will disappear through political change in Minsk—when that happens—or through deterrence so robust that using it would become suicidal for Moscow. We are working on the second option. History, perhaps, is working on the first.

Signed, Maxime Marquette, columnist