The war in Ukraine is moving dangerously close to Belarus, Moscow’s main ally but whose troops have so far kept a cautious distance from the conflict. On the night of Wednesday 4 to Thursday 5 September, Russia launched a new massive attack with Shahed kamikaze drones against Ukraine. Eight of them flew over Belarusian airspace, two of which were shot down by Belarusian forces near Gomel, 30 kilometres from the border with Ukraine, the Belarusian military monitoring group Hajun Project reported on Thursday.
Both devices were intercepted by fighter jets at around 01:30 local time. The affair appears to embarrass the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, whose country has served as a rear base for Russian troops since the start of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In a statement published on Telegram on Thursday, the Chief of the General Staff and First Deputy Commander of the Air Force and Air Defense, Colonel Sergei Frolov, denounced a violation of airspace by drones. “intruder”. However, he carefully avoided specifying that they were Russian. “The decision was made to destroy them (…). This is under investigation”he added. Russia had not officially reacted by Thursday evening.
Noise “too loud” to ignore
This is not the first time that Moscow has violated Belarusian airspace. According to the Belarusian Hajun Project, an independent military monitoring group, “Russian Shahed-131/136 drones have been systematically flying over Belarus since early July”. Remember also that since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, “At least 721 missiles were launched from the territory of Belarus against Ukraine or from Russia, crossing Belarusian airspace”.
Over the past two months, “more than twenty drones” They have already entered its airspace, he said. World the Belarusian Hajun project. Until now, none of these incidents had been the subject of an official reaction, apart from “Propaganda tries to deny everything”But the events of September 4-5 in Gomel, a city of half a million people, can hardly be ignored. “The noise was too loud, explains the Belarusian project Hajun. There is no doubt that if the drones had been shot down in a less urbanized territory there would have been no official reaction. »
The Belarusian Air Force began shooting down some of these drones a few days ago. On August 29, during an earlier Moscow attack on Ukraine, a Belarusian fighter jet destroyed a Shahed drone that was penetrating the airspace in the Yelsk region in the middle of the night. In total, at least three Shahed drones have been destroyed by the Minsk military so far, according to data from the Belarusian Hajun project. This would be a security measure: “It is clear that these drones flying over Belarus represent a significant danger. The Belarusian Air Force appears to shoot them down to prevent a Shahed from landing on a house, for example.”
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