Chinese military personnel have arrived in Belarus for joint exercises near the Polish border – which is also the eastern flank of NATO and the EU – that begin today and last for almost two weeks.
Images shared by Belarus’s defence ministry showed the Chinese troops arriving on Saturday. They will “participate in joint anti-terrorist training from July 8 to 19”, said the ministry.
“The training will allow the exchange of experience, coordination between Belarusian and Chinese units, [and] create a foundation for further development of Belarusian-Chinese relations in the field of joint training of troops,” they added.
China’s defence ministry confirmed on Sunday that the exercises, titled “Eagle Assault”, would take place around Brest, which sits right on the border with Poland.
They will involve “hostage rescue operations and counter-terrorism missions” aimed at “enhancing training levels and coordination capabilities, as well as deepening practical cooperation between the armies of the two countries”, reports Chinese state news agency Xinhua.
The development comes just two weeks after Poland’s President Andrzej Duda visited Beijing for talks with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. Afterwards, Duda hailed Polish-Chinese relations and said that he was “very happy that President [Xi] calls me a friend”.
On Friday, Vladimir Kupriyanyuk, the deputy head of the general staff of Belarus’s armed forces, suggested that the exercises are a response to a buildup of NATO forces in the region.
“The current situation around Belarus continues to develop under the influence of negative factors caused by the aggressive foreign policy of the West towards the Union State of Belarus and Russia,” said Kupriyanyuk.
“In these conditions, in the western direction, directly at our borders, we see a systematic deployment of NATO coalition soldiers,” he added, quoted by Polish news website Interia.
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Anton Gerashchenko, a former deputy interior minister of Ukraine, called the Chinese-Belarusian exercise “alarming news, not only for Ukraine”.
By holding “a military exercise in Europe, on the border with NATO, Beijing thereby sends a signal to Washington and demonstrates its readiness to use the military infrastructure and territory of Belarus”, wrote Gerashchenko on X.
“We are watching how the bloc of Russia, China and Belarus is forming and harmonising not only politically, economically but also militarily,” he added. “One of the goals of the bloc is to counter NATO and the West.”
Poland’s government has not yet commented on the exercises. Recent years have seen growing tensions between Poland and Belarus, including a crisis at the border, where tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers have sought to cross illegally with the help of the Belarusian authorities in what Poland calls a “hybrid attack”.
Recent months have seen a surge in attempted crossings over Poland's border with Belarus as well as violence by migrants towards Polish officers.
Security expert @MPiekarski24 explains why the situation has changed and how the government is addressing it https://t.co/tYNT5eL9SZ
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Main image credit: Belarus defence ministry/Facebook
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
