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Russian president appeared to be responding to Warsaw’s decision to re-station military units closer to the Belarusian border.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Poland that any attack on Belarus will be considered an attack on Russia, in a direct threat to the NATO country televised on Friday.
“Aggression against Belarus will mean aggression against the Russian Federation,” Putin told a televised Security Council meeting on Friday, shown by Reuters. “We will respond to it with all means at our disposal,” he said.
Putin appeared to be responding to Warsaw’s decision this week to re-station military units to the east of the country, closer to the Belarusian border, following the Russian ally’s hosting of Wagner mercenary fighters.
Putin said that Poland appears to have interests in retaking eastern territories it lost to former Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin, including “a good chunk of Ukraine … to take back the historic lands.” He added that “it’s well known that they dream of Belarusian lands as well.”
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki hit back later on Friday, tweeting that “Stalin was a war criminal, guilty of the death of hundreds of thousands of Poles.” He said that the ambassador of the Russian Federation will be summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Morawiecki’s defense minister defended the relocation of troops on Friday, pointing to reports that the Wagner mercenaries were carrying out training exercises with the Belarusian army.
“Training or joint exercises of the Belarusian army and the Wagner group are undoubtedly a provocation,” said Zbigniew Hoffmann, secretary of the government’s National Security Committee, according to a report by Polish state-run news agency PAP.
Belarus has been Russia’s ally throughout Putin’s war on Ukraine. In addition to hosting the Wagner Group following an insurrection on Moscow led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has allowed Putin to station tactical nuclear weapons on its territory.
Germany said Berlin and NATO were prepared to support Poland in defending the eastern border, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on Friday, according to Reuters.
Bulgaria, meanwhile, has agreed to provide Ukraine with some 100 armored personnel carriers, marking a U-turn in the NATO member’s policy on sending military equipment to Kyiv following the appointment of a new, pro-Western government. The parliament in Sofia late Friday approved the administration’s proposal to make the first shipment of heavy military equipment to Ukraine since the beginning of the war, the AP reported.
Separately, a drone attack on an ammunition depot in Crimea prompted an evacuation and brief suspension of road traffic on the bridge linking the peninsula to Russia, Reuters reported. Sergei Aksyonov, the Moscow-installed regional governor, said on Saturday that there was an explosion at the depot in Krasnohvardiiske in central Crimea but reported no damage or casualties, according to the report.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy discussed the Black Sea grain deal with both Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in recent days. Kyiv is seeking to unblock the Black Sea grain corridor after Moscow ended the crucial deal last Monday.
After his call with Zelenskyy on Saturday, Stoltenberg said in a tweet: “We strongly condemn Moscow’s attempt to weaponize food. Allies stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes … Ukraine is closer to NATO than ever before.”
Zelenskyy said on Twitter that he discussed with the NATO chief steps to make the transport of grain across the Black Sea possible again and to guarantee it in the long term. He did not go into further detail.
Erdogan and Zelenskyy on Friday discussed “in detail” the renewal of the Black Sea Grain Initiative , the Turkish presidency said in a statement. On the call, Zelenskyy called unblocking the grain corridor “an absolute priority,” the Ukrainian president’s office said.
In his nightly address on Saturday, Zelenskyy said he asked Stoltenberg to convene the NATO-Ukraine Council, which was set up at this month’s NATO summit, to discuss security in the Black Sea, particularly the operation of the grain corridor.
Zelenskyy said he asked Stoltenberg “to urgently convene such a meeting of the Council for appropriate crisis consultations. The meeting will take place in a few days,” he added.
This article has been updated.
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