Belarus says Ukraine amassing troops at border amid incursion into Russia

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko says Kyiv has stationed more than 120,000 soldiers along its border with Belarus, the country’s state news agency reported, as fighting continues amid Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.

Lukashenko, a staunch ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said on Sunday that Minsk had deployed nearly a third of its armed forces along the entire border in response to the Ukrainian deployment, BelTA reported. Kyiv did not immediately respond to the claims.

“Seeing their aggressive policy, we have introduced there and placed in certain points – in case of war, they would be defence – our military along the entire border,” BelTA quoted Lukashenko as saying in an interview with Russian state television.

Lukashenko is “delivering some very serious threats to officials in Kyiv”, said Al Jazeera’s Dorsa Jabbari, reporting from Moscow.

The president made it clear that should Ukraine try to enter Belarusian soil, they will be on the offensive, Jabbari added.

Lukashenko did not say exactly how many Belarusian soldiers were deployed. Belarus’s professional army has about 48,000 soldiers and some 12,000 state border personnel, according to The Military Balance 2022 assessment of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Ongoing attacks

The comments come against the backdrop of a Ukrainian incursion into Russia that began on August 6, when thousands of Kyiv’s soldiers smashed through Russia’s western border into the Kursk region in a major embarrassment for Putin’s military top brass.

Ukrainian forces on Sunday said they struck another bridge in the Kursk region, seeking to disrupt Moscow’s combat operations in the area.

Earlier on Sunday, Ukrainian drones attacked an oil storage facility in Russia’s southern Rostov region, sparking a large fuel fire, the regional governor confirmed.

“In the south-east of the Rostov region, air defences repelled a drone attack. As a result of falling debris on the territory of industrial storage facilities in Proletarsk, a diesel fuel fire broke out,” Governor Vasily Golubev said on Telegram. No injuries were reported and a second drone attack shortly afterwards, he said.

The Russian-installed mayor of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, also said on Sunday that two people had been killed in Ukrainian shelling of the occupied city.

Ukrainian forces meanwhile said they thwarted a Russian missile attack on the capital, Kyiv, where air raid sirens sounded before dawn on Sunday.

“This is the third ballistic missile attack on the capital in August with a clear interval of six days between each attack,” the Kyiv City Military Administration posted on Telegram after the early morning barrage.

Simultaneous to the missile attack, drones were spotted heading to Kyiv.

“All enemy drones were destroyed far outside the city,” it added.

No damage or casualties were reported from the attack, which the administration said had “most likely used North Korean ballistic missiles of the KN-23 type”.

The United States and South Korea have accused North Korea of providing ammunition and missiles to Russia for its war in Ukraine.

North Korea on Sunday condemned Ukraine’s incursion into Russia as an unforgivable act of terror backed by Washington and the West, adding it will always stand with Russia as it seeks to protect its sovereignty. The US’s “anti-Russia policy” was bringing the world closer to World War III, state media reported.

Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant

Elsewhere, the United Nations nuclear watchdog warned that the safety situation at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is “deteriorating” following a drone strike nearby.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warned on Saturday of an escalation in the security dangers at the plant, reporting “intense” military activity over the past week in the area, including very close to the plant.

“I remain extremely concerned and reiterate my call for maximum restraint from all sides,” IAEA head Rafael Grossi said in the statement, adding the “nuclear safety situation” at the plant was “deteriorating”.

On Saturday, Russia accused Ukraine of dropping an explosive charge on a road near the occupied plant in southern Ukraine. The plant, seized by Russian forces early in the war, has come under repeated attacks that both sides have accused each other of carrying out.

IAEA experts on site reported that the damage “seemed to have been caused by a drone equipped with an explosive payload”, affecting the road between the plant’s two main gates.

“We’re not clear whether the drone was targeting the nuclear power plant itself,” said Al Jazeera’s Alex Gatapolous, reporting from Kyiv.

“But it came close enough to a power line. These power lines run through the plant and provide it with the emergency energy that it would need to be able to shut down in case of any accident,” he explained.

“The attention on Zaporizhzhia seems to have come, whether coincidentally or not, as Ukrainian forces are only several dozen kilometres away from the Kursk nuclear power plant in Russia,” Gatapolous added.