Russian military vehicles move on Dvortsovaya Square during the general rehearsal of the Victory Day military parade in central Saint Petersburg on May 7, 2025. (Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images)
The joint Russia-Belarus Zapad drills are a regular cause for concern in Europe.
While thinly veiled as defensive, the exercises have been straining Belarus’ relations with its neighbors for over a decade. This September, they will be held again.
The fifth set of exercises, Zapad-2025, has been downsized and moved further from the border, although they are still a cause for suspicion after the last “joint drill” — Union Resolve in early 2022 — was used to mask the buildup of a Russian assault force that stormed into Ukraine in February of that year.
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Belarus Weekly
This time, Belarus experts who spoke with the Kyiv Independent say that an attack on NATO countries from Belarus is unlikely.
At least for now.
What are the Zapad exercises?
Zapad (meaning “west” in Russian) is one of a set of biannual joint Russia-Belarus military exercises held in September. It alternates with the Union Shield drills, the Russia-based part of the exercises, which are themselves part of a four-year cycle of Russian military drills.
When held in Belarus, Zapad tends to alarm NATO member states due to their proximity to the borders of neighboring Poland and Lithuania.
The drills were inaugurated in 2009 under the Union State framework. The goal was to coordinate and train the Regional Military Grouping, the Union’s defense force, which combined the Belarusian military and the Russian 20th Guards Combined Arms Army of the Western Military District.
Each Zapad reportedly involves between 12,000 and 13,000 troops, though NATO has contested the officially reported numbers.
Referring to multiple drills occurring at around the same time, Western observers say that Russia has split one major drill into smaller exercises to avoid triggering the Vienna Document, which requires transparency for large exercises.
Officially defensive, Zapad scenarios typically involve an attack by “terrorist groups” from across the border or foreign-backed domestic unrest. In reality, the fake adversaries are clearly meant to represent neighboring NATO member states.
Notoriously, Zapad-2017 featured three fictional states, Vesbaria, Lubenia, and Veyshnoria, which resembled the Baltic states Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and included territories in the Suwalki gap, an area of land separating the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast and western Belarus.
Veyshnoria, based on a chunk of western Belarus with a Catholic-majority population, was described as having separatist tendencies.
The scenario was so far-fetched that it became an anti-regime meme in Belarus, with the fake country receiving a flag, anthem, an election committee, and a fake foreign ministry Twitter account.
As a result, in 2022, the mention of Veyshnoria was branded extremist by Belarusian authorities.
In 2017, after the signing of the Minsk agreements, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko experienced a brief thaw with the West. To avoid further damaging relations with the West, he invited international observers and moved them further from the border.
Similar moves are being repeated in 2025 — although under wildly different circumstances.
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From joint drill to invasion launchpad
Following his reported loss in the 2020 presidential election, Lukashenko relied on Moscow’s support to suppress nationwide protests at the rigging of the result in his favor. Then, in response to Western sanctions, Lukashenko launched an artificial migration crisis, funneling irregular migrants to the EU borders.
The Zapad-2021 drills reflected the deteriorated relations — the war games scenario openly described the imaginary “Western states” inspiring riots within Belarus and then launching open aggression.
Analysts from the Institute for the Study of War saw these drills as a further move to integrate Belarusian forces into Russian command structures. For the first time, the scale of the exercises was not downplayed. While Belarus still hosted some 12,800 troops, the officially reported overall number of personnel involved reached 200,000. The highest estimates by NATO experts of the total number of troops taking part in previous drills did not exceed 100,000.
Russia began preliminary training months in advance of the 2021 drills and practiced drone warfare and communications jamming. A southern element to the scenario involving Ukraine was introduced. Lukashenko spoke of a “heating up from the south” while talking about the procurement of Russian S-400 air defense systems.
In late September, the Belarusian military reported the full withdrawal of Russian troops.
Soon, however, Russia and Belarus announced snap exercises, Union Resolve, which were not governed by any treaty or agreement. The drills were a cover for the amassing of the attack force for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The invasion saw Russia-Belarus military cooperation move from the theoretical to the practical. In October 2022, Lukashenko announced that the Regional Military Grouping, previously trained at Zapad exercises, would be deployed in Belarus, citing an increased threat at the Union State’s frontiers.
According to the monitoring group Belarusian Hajun, which actively reported Russian troops’ movement in Belarus at the time, the deployment served as a cover-up for training mobilized Russian personnel at Belarusian training ranges before dispatching them to Ukraine. The training, reportedly involving up to 15,000 Russian troops, lasted until July 2023 and concluded without any notification of the withdrawal of the Regional Military Grouping.
In late 2022, Russia’s then Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced new Zapad drills — only to cancel them in September 2023. U.K. Intelligence attributed the cancellation to the depletion of Russian military resources.
What’s next?
The Zapad-2025 drills were kept in secret for months, while the eventual location and number of troops had been changing on a monthly basis.
Initially announced to involve up to 13,000 troops, the drills were downscaled and pulled deeper into the country in May.
In July, Belarusian Deputy Defense Minister Pavel Muraveika said Belarus might backtrack, citing military activities of its “Western colleagues.”
The referred activities were defensive drills conducted in Lithuania and Poland that were themselves launched in response to Zapad-2025.
Lithuania held Arsus Vilkas (Fierce Wolf 2025) drills between Aug. 11 and Aug. 22. From mid-August to late September, Poland hosts Iron Defender-25, a joint exercise with NATO allies, involving around 34,000 military personnel and some 600 units of military equipment.
Belarus’ neighbors have also announced their withdrawal from the anti-landmine treaty, allowing them to fortify their border with minefields.
According to Lithuanian intelligence, Zapad-2025 is expected to include fewer troops than before — some 30,000 personnel in total, with 6,000-8,000 of them stationed in Belarus and some in Russia’s exclave, Kaliningrad Oblast.
The drills have likely been downscaled due to Russian losses in Ukraine and a lack of hardware on the battlefield, the opposition watchdog Belpol has suggested.
The independent security think-tank iSANS estimated that only about 2,150 Russian troops, limited to their permanent location — two Russian communications bases and an airfield — were stationed in Belarus in June.
Additional Russian troops have begun to arrive on Aug. 6. Their precise numbers remain unknown.
The Ukrainian State Border Guard Service estimated that several hundred Russian soldiers and dozens of pieces of equipment — amounts assessed as non-threatening — have already arrived.
Political analyst Artsiom Shraibman said that a downscaling akin to the 2017 drills would have required Moscow’s approval.
Minsk might have been assured that no new offensive was planned and that the Kremlin currently has different priorities, and Lukashenko presented it as a peacemaking gesture, Shraibman told the Kyiv Independent.
In a conversation with the Kyiv Independent, Belpol representative Uladzimir Zhyhar also noted that Belarusian-Russian military cooperation is a concern for the longer term: Russia is investing in the Belarusian military-industrial complex to produce the weapons that have proved effective in the war against Ukraine.
Launching large-scale military operations before these production facilities reach full capacity, while also being unable to protect them from retaliatory strikes, is “impractical” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Zhyhar said.
Belarusian industrial enterprises and over 200 commercial structures are set to reach full capacity by 2027-2028, producing around 300,000 152 mm artillery shells, 450,000 122 mm rockets for Grad multiple launch rocket systems, up to 1,000 strike and reconnaissance UAVs, approximately 1,000,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition, and 30-50 electronic warfare systems, according to Zhyhar.
Rather than an all-out attack, Belpol foresees a limited provocation in the mid-term.
Russia might attempt to capture some territory in a NATO member-state to see if it triggers Article 5 or if the United States and other major NATO countries refrain from intervening — a lot will depend on their reaction.
“We can say with confidence that by 2029-2030, Putin will still want to invade Europe and split NATO,” Zhyhar said, citing Belpol’s military experts.
Shraibman outlined other hypothetical scenarios for Kremlin provocations.
Russia might reignite the migration crisis and stage a lethal border clash, resume air strikes on Ukraine to provoke retaliation on Belarus, which would trigger defense obligations under the military doctrine Belarus and Russia agreed in December 2024, or it might escalate tensions over access to Kaliningrad.
However, all of these scenarios are purely hypothetical, Shraibman said, adding that Belarus can still be treated as an actor separate from Moscow — one that can be reminded of the cost of an all-out war.
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