Belarus and Russia have staged unannounced military drills near the border with Poland and Lithuania, the Belarusian Defence Ministry said on Thursday.
Russia’s military plane Il-76 and Belarusian helicopters landed airborne troops at a training ground near Grodno, which is several dozen kilometres from the Polish and Lithuanian borders.
“After the landing, the Belarusian and Russian paratroopers will perform a number of combat training tasks,” the ministry said in a press release. Later, the troops “will return to their permanent deployment points”, it added.
Read more: Migration crisis in Baltics and Poland
Belarus claims the snap drills come in response to the “buildup of military activity” nears its borders. Poland has sent troops to the border with Belarus in response to an influx of irreuglar migrants.
Hundreds of people have gathered on the Polish border since Monday, marking a sharp escalation of the border crisis that began in summer 2021.
The European Union, as well as Belarus’ neighbours, say the Minsk regime is using migrants as a way to pressure the bloc in response to sanctions, which were imposed in response to Alexander Lukashenko’s brutal crackdown of the opposition in the wake of the August 2020 presidential election.
Read more: Lithuania ups readiness of troops at Belarus border
Two paratroops allegedly killed
Two paratroopers were reportedly killed in an incident during the drills, according to Lithuanian Defence Minister Arvydas Anušauskas.
"Unfortunately, according to the information available to us, [the drills] did not avoid an incident, during which two paratroopers were killed," he told reporters on Thursday.
Earlier, Belarusian opposition channel NEXTA was the first to report about the alleged incident.
Due to a failure of the parachutes, "two servicemen of the armed forces of the Russian Federation – an officer and a conscript soldier – were killed", NEXTA quoted BYSOL, an opposition foundation, as saying.
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