Belarusian Defence Ministry complains it did not receive invitation to NATO exercise

Valery Revenko, head of the Department of International Military Cooperation of the Belarusian Defence Ministry, complained that Minsk had received neither a notice about the largest NATO exercise since the Cold War nor an invitation to attend.

Source: European Pravda

Details: In a series of posts on Twitter (X) on 23 January, Revenko criticised "individual states" for failing to comply with the so-called OSCE Vienna Document, which requires member states to inform them of large-scale military activities.

"NATO countries are planning to involve 90,000 troops in the 'largest exercise in a decade', but Belarus has received neither notification nor invitation," the Belarusian official complained.

Mentioning Poland, which did not notify the Belarusian regime about its upcoming exercises in late February, Revenko states that "this approach has nothing to do with the declared desire to preserve the current security architecture in Europe".

The Belarusian defence ministry official did not mention that neighbouring Russia has repeatedly violated its commitments under the Vienna Document.

In 2021, Russia ignored a request from Ukraine to explain its military activities near its borders, insisting that it was "not obliged" to do so, and in 2023, it refused to disclose data on its armed forces to other OSCE members.

In February, the North Atlantic Alliance will organise a large-scale military manoeuvre called Steadfast Defender, the largest since the end of the Cold War. The Western defence alliance wants to mobilise about 90,000 soldiers for this purpose.

In particular, they will be practising the alerting and deployment of national and multinational ground forces.

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