Kremlin kamikaze drones violated Polish air space 48 hours before the scheduled start of a provocative Russo-Belarusian military exercise that will practice firing nuclear weapon-tipped medium-range ballistic missiles from Belarus launch sites at targets in Europe.
Most troops deploying for the exercise, called Zapad-2025, will simulate attacking with and defending against nuclear weapons in military training areas into central or north-western Belarus, or in the Russian enclave Kaliningrad. Smaller contingents in Russia’s Moscow and Leningrad military districts, the Arctic region, and the Baltic and Barents Seas also will participate, Kremlin statements have said.
About 13,000 Russian and Belarusian soldiers will per official reports from Minsk be on the ground in Belarus. Russia announced it was deploying nuclear weapons to Belarus in June 2023, at the time claiming it was a necessary response to western deliveries of long-range conventional weapons to Ukraine. By midday Wednesday, authorities had not announced any planned actual missile launches during the two-week exercises.
Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko in August said the main focus of the training will be joint Belarusian-Russian operations in a nuclear war and, particularly, the field use of the much-touted Russian nuclear strike missile – the Oreshnik – a statement published by Lukashenko’s office said.
During the exercise, troops will practice planning nuclear strikes against a potential adversary and carrying them out, and the objective of the training is to “maintain credibility” of Russia’s and Belarus’ nuclear deterrent force, Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin told the state-run Belta news agency.
The Oreshnik’s planned deployment to Belarus
The Oreshnik is a relatively new Russian intermediate-range, nuclear capable ballistic missile (IRBM), scheduled per official Moscow statements to be deployed to Belarus by the end of the year. Kremlin officials have claimed the weapon’s hyper-sonic speed and maneuvering capability makes it invulnerable to interception.
Russian state media has reported, without evidence, that the missile is capable of hitting any target on the European continent in under an hour and obliterating it with up to six independently maneuvering warheads each armed with an atomic munition.
Russia’s only known wartime use of the Oreshnik missile, with conventional warheads, was on Nov. 21, 2024. The strike hit the premises of Dnipro’s Yuzhmash, an aerospace factory with some production facilities underground. The attack damaged surface buildings and a residential neighborhood nearby.
Some Ukrainian media have claimed that two subsequent Oreshnik launches failed after the missile left its intended trajectory, but that has not been independently confirmed. Ukraine’s air force has reported no Oreshnik strikes anywhere in the country since the Dnipro attack. The Kremlin has said it wants to deploy Oreshnik missiles to Belarus by the end of 2025.
The Ukrainian research group Skhemi, a Radio Liberty-supported investigative reporting project, on Wednesday published satellite images of a military base outside the Belarusian capital Minsk described as a likely base for the weapon. Located near the village of Pavlovka, the two-square kilometer site still under construction contains warehouses, three hangars for equipment, and the foundations of new buildings, including for personnel, the report said.
Aside from Oreshnik missile use and simulated launch against targets in Europe, Russian and Belarusian troops will practice responses to air strikes, ground and air combat warfare against a NATO-type foe, and special operations warfare, Belta reported.
Russian formations identified by Ukrainian military intelligence in early August as en route by train to Belarus for the training included 252nd, 488th, 423rd and 15th Motor Rifle Regiments. According to Ukrainian OSINT reports, none of those units has been in combat in Ukraine.
Zapad-2025’s main activities will be staged at a training area near the city of Barysaw, in central Belarus, though smaller exercises will per official statements take place near the Belarusian north-eastern town of Gozha, 13 kilometers from the Lithuanian border.
Gozha is next to the southern exit of a strategic corridor in Poland and Lithuania some 80 kilometers wide, called the Suwalki Gap, that separates the Kremlin-owned Kaliningrad enclave from Belarusian territory. NATO strategists have worried that were NATO and Russia to go to war, Russian forces could cut off the Baltic member states Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia from the rest of the Atlantic Alliance by overrunning the Suwalki Gap.
Deep distrust between NATO and the Kremlin
Poland in early September launched its largest military exercise of the year, Iron Defender-25. The training with approximately 30,000–40,000 Polish and allied troops is scheduled to run to the end of the month. According to NATO statements, troops will practice rapid deployment, joint tactical maneuvers, air and ground combat operations, and responses to hybrid threats.
Aside from Lithuanian regular and home guard troops, a 1,400-man multi-national battle group is based mostly in the Lithuanian town of Rukla, with smaller contingents based near the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. Germany with 850 troops is the backbone force of the battle group, with Belgium, Czechia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Croatia, and Iceland rotating smaller contingents to the unit.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Sept. 9 announced that Warsaw would close its border with Belarus, including railway crossings, at midnight on Thursday, Sept, 11, due to the Zapad-2025 military exercises, citing “deep distrust” between NATO and the Kremlin, and the need for Poland to be “prepared for possible provocations, sabotage and potential aggression.”
Official statements from both Minsk and Moscow have called the Zapad-25 exercises defensive in nature and denied aggressive intent towards NATO.
President Volodymyr Zelensky in Feb. 2025 said Russian and Belarusian forces concentrating in Belarus could number up to 150,000 men. Western military analysts have not confirmed the figure. Ukraine is prepared to defeat Russian forces attempting to invade again from Belarusian territory, as they did in Feb. 2022, Zelensky said.
Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s secretive military intelligence agency HUR, commented to a local news program on Aug. 31 that the Zapad-25 exercise’s main objective was not military readiness, but rather psychological pressure by the Kremlin on NATO member states unsure about confronting Russia. The Kremlin intends to use the exercise “to spread disinformation…through ‘cognitive influence’ operations…aimed at manipulating public perception,” Budanov said.
On Monday, in comments to the Apostrophe TV channel, Budanov again played down the possibility of the exercises being a real war threat to NATO, saying in part: that that do “not pose a threat to Ukraine and the countries of the European Union” He added: “These are planned exercises, and there is currently no threat… This is a planned event, it is held annually.”
Ukraine in 1994 handed over all its nuclear weapons to Russia in a treaty also signed by the US, Russia and the UK. The agreement committed all four countries to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and to intervene against nuclear-armed states attacking Ukraine. However, since then Russia has invaded Ukraine twice, in 2014 and 2022.