Referenews

“The risks are really high, even though the Belarusian leadership clearly wants to stay away from any direct military involvement in the conflict,” said political scientist Yauheni Preiherman, director of the Minsk Dialogue Council on International Relations, a global-affairs and security think tank based in the Belarusian capital.

Mr. Lukashenko said on Friday that economic discussions would take center stage at the meeting with Mr. Putin, but that the two men wouldn’t duck any discussion about the “military-political situation around our states,” as he put it.

Political analysts said the authoritarian leader appeared defensive as he tried to dispel suggestions that Mr. Putin could undermine his position, much as Russia did when both countries were bound together in the Soviet Union, by compelling him to enter the war.

“I can see tensions rising…everyone will be saying there is no authority in Belarus and Russians are walking around and governing this country,” the Belarusian presidential press service quoted Mr. Lukashenko as saying at a meeting on Belarusian-Russian cooperation in Minsk. “I would like to underline this specific feature: no one else but us is governing Belarus,” he added.

Mr. Lukashenko, however, has already allowed Moscow to use Belarus as a staging ground in its invasion of Ukraine, which began in February. Tens of thousands of Russian troops were stationed there and Russian war planes took off from Belarusian bases.

Indeed, access to Belarusian bases and territory is more useful to Russia than actual Belarusian troops, and this is something Moscow already has, said Arkady Moshes, a policy analyst and researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, an independent research institute in Helsinki.

“It’s about total control over Belarusian territory and the possibility to bring in and withdraw troops at will,” Mr. Moshes said. “Right now, Russian troops are deployed on the territory of Belarus practically without any legal framework.”

Recent weeks have seen a flurry of military activity on Belarus’s border with Ukraine, with Russian forces holding joint combat drills with Belarusian forces. Last week, Minsk held snap military drills, which defense officials said were ordered by Mr. Lukashenko to check the combat readiness of the nation’s troops.

Mr. Moshes said the moves are calculated in part to create the impression that Minsk could formally enter the war in support of Russia on Ukraine’s northern flank at a time when Kyiv is trying to cement its advances toward the east and south.

“As long as there is this joint grouping, for as long as there is at least a hypothetical possibility of these troops being used against Ukraine, Ukraine’s hands will be somewhat tied.”

Mr. Preiherman said growing concerns in the West about what role Belarus might take in the conflict could prove useful for Ukraine, in that it enables Kyiv to bolster its argument that it needs more support from the West.

In October, Ukrainian President

Volodymyr Zelensky

called on the leaders of the Group of Seven advanced economies to support his proposal to deploy an international observer mission on the Ukraine-Belarus border to monitor the security situation, and asked these countries to provide Ukraine with more air-defense systems.

Last week, U.S. officials said Washington was finalizing plans to provide Ukraine with highly advanced Patriot missile-defense systems that would significantly boost its air-defense capabilities.

Still, if Belarus does play a more direct role in the war, this would be politically dangerous for Mr. Lukashenko, who is already facing growing pressure from a disputed election in 2020 and a worsening economy.

“The involvement of the Belarusian military in the war will produce a domestic crisis,” Mr. Moshes said, adding that such a move is “completely unpopular in Belarus. There is practically a national consensus that this shouldn’t happen. It’s very risky and Lukashenko understands that,” he said.

Even if Belarus were pulled directly into the conflict, it wouldn’t fundamentally change the course of the war, according to assessments by military analysts. Belarus’s army is poorly equipped and isn’t combat-ready, having never fought a battle in its 31 years of independence from the old Soviet Union, they said. The greatest number of troops Minsk could muster to help Moscow would probably be 10,000 to 15,000, analysts said.

But other analysts cautioned that the risks that come with Belarus getting more involved in the war don’t just revolve around how many boots Minsk could offer on the ground in Ukraine. The landlocked country not only borders Russia and Ukraine, but also European-Union nations Latvia, Lithuania and Poland—all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Minsk’s recent combat-readiness drills already saw some Belarusian troops and tanks move closer to Belarus’s borders with Poland and Lithuania, increasing the danger that the conflict could spill over.

“If Belarus were to be involved directly, then the chances of further horizontal escalation of the conflict would heighten tremendously,” Mr. Preiherman said.

Write to Ann M. Simmons at ann.simmons@wsj.com