Did Belarusian rebels blow up one of Putin’s planes?

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko has some awkward explaining to do to Vladimir Putin after a Russian military plane, being stored in Belarus, was reportedly blown up last weekend by Belarusian rebels. 

According to reports, one of the nine working Beriev A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft (Awacs) owned by the Russian military was attacked at the Machiulishchy airfield, just under eight miles from the capital Minsk, where it had been kept since early January this year. The aircraft, said to be worth £274 million, was capable of detecting and targeting air defence systems and formed a key part of Russia’s battlefield strategy.

A day after what sounded like two explosions came from the airbase on 26 February, the Belarusian partisan group BYPOL claimed responsibility for blowing the aircraft up. They said that two of their members, already safely removed from the country, had used drones to destroy the plane.

This claim has not been independently verified, but drone footage has emerged over the last couple of days appearing to show the kamikaze drones responsible performing reconnaissance work at the airfield, as well as actually planting the explosives. In the first video, a drone approaches the airfield, lands on one of the planes, rests for a few seconds and then flies off again. In the second, below, a drone flies to what appears to be the same airfield, lands in two different locations on the same or similar aircraft, before the screen blacks out – presumably due to an explosion.

While the Belarusian and Russian regimes refused to acknowledge the event outright, they didn’t deny it took place either. A day after the plane was allegedly blown up, Lukashenko convened an emergency session of Belarus’s security forces. 

‘In the light of internal and, above all, external events, I would like to hear from your lips a description of the internal political and military components surrounding our Belarus,’ he ordered them. ‘We all need to spot the slightest aggressiveness against our state on the borders of our country in order to take appropriate response measures.

Interestingly, it has been the Russian pro-Kremlin military blogging community which has been redistributing the videos and reporting the incident as fact. Reposting one of the videos, one blogger who goes by the handle @milinfolive wrote in exasperation: ‘The very fact that air bases with Russian aircraft were unprotected before the attacks, after a year of hostilities, already says enough without our added comments.’

Russia’s milblogging community takes an increasingly unforgiving stance on the country’s military mistakes. It’s for this reason that it seems willing to draw Russian attention to damaging videos, such as this one. Their ire has, so far, been directed at the military, in this case both the Russian and Belarusian; how could Russian war planes entrusted to Belarus for safekeeping be so woefully protected, they ask. But it’s not inconceivable to see how their criticism could soon be aimed more directly at Putin.

The Belarusian government has tried its best to deny that the aircraft sustained any serious damage, including showing footage supposedly of the aircraft in question taking off on state TV. Nevertheless, the Belarusian independent news outlet Nexta has claimed it has, in fact, been moved to Taganrog in southwest Russia for repairs. 

Over the past few days, it appears Lukashenko’s forces have begun reprisals in Belarus aimed at finding out any information possibly related to the responsible rebels. Independent Russian-language media has reported that inspections at the Belarusian border have intensified for anyone wanting to leave the country. According to the Belarusian human rights watchdog Viasna, starting on 4 March, Lukashenko’s internal security service, the KGB, began searches, round ups and arrests in connection with the attack. Targeting anyone prosecuted on administrative and political charges between 2020 (when Belarus’s contested election took place) and this year, the KGB have reportedly been removing those arrested to detention centres. 

Today, Lukashenko appears to have entered damage control mode. In a lengthy speech, he claimed that a ‘terrorist from the Ukrainian intelligence services’, as well as ‘accomplices’, had been arrested in connection with the explosion. Without providing any evidence, he said that these ‘terrorists’ had the backing of Ukraine and the American CIA. The aircraft itself, he said, was not in fact a Russian aircraft and had never flown into Ukrainian territory: Putin had simply loaned the plane to Lukashenko for domestic security reasons. Chillingly, the KGB round-ups that began over the weekend were unrelated to this event, but an order by Lukashenko to conduct a ‘brutal cleansing of the country’.

This disturbing rhetoric appears to be an attempt by the Belarusian president to save face, both domestically and with Russia. Whether the KGB have indeed arrested people connected to the sabotage, found a scapegoat or simply made this whole story of arrests up remains to be seen. That the plane didn’t belong to the Russian military is almost certainly disinformation.

Whoever is to blame, this incident is deeply embarrassing for Lukashenko. One of the main ways he has managed to keep Belarus out of the direct conflict in Ukraine has been to prove himself useful to Putin’s war effort. That he has failed to adequately protect Russia’s weapons will imply, in the eyes of the Kremlin, that he can’t even do that. 

For several months now, Putin has become increasingly paranoid about the possibility of Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian territory. This incident will likely reinforce those fears. Admittedly, in the eyes of the Ukrainians (and the Belarusian partisans responsible for this attack) this is no bad thing – after all, it means one less aircraft capable of attacking Ukraine. This attack will certainly have exposed key weaknesses in Russia and Belarus’s military capabilities. While Lukashenko will have heightened security for now, the circumstances that allowed these drones to slip onto the airfield unnoticed will not have been unique to Machiulishchy. It is just a matter of time before someone, Belarusian rebel or Ukrainian military, has another go.

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