Zelenskiy pressures Belarus to dismantle relay stations used for drone attacks

Volodymyr Zelenskiy put Belarus under direct pressure over a piece of infrastructure that Kyiv says is helping Russian drone attacks reach deeper into Ukraine. On June 20, 2026, the Ukrainian president again urged Belarusian authorities to dismantle relay stations he said were being used in strikes on Ukrainian regions, escalating a dispute that now centers on whether Minsk is tolerating support for Russia’s war effort or hosting equipment that enables it.

Zelenskiy made the appeal for a second straight day and, in separate coverage, gave Belarus a one-week ultimatum to remove the relay equipment. He warned that Ukraine would otherwise act itself to stop the transmissions. By singling out relay stations rather than making a broad diplomatic complaint, Zelenskiy framed the issue as a concrete military problem with a narrow technical fix.

The stations Zelenskiy cited were said to be in two Belarusian regions bordering Ukraine. Ukrainian coverage identified four signal repeaters in Homiel oblast and Brest oblast, both along Belarus’s frontier with Ukraine. Zelenskiy said the equipment was used by Russian forces to help with steering during attacks on Ukrainian civilians, tying the hardware directly to the drone threat facing northern Ukrainian regions.

The confrontation reflected a wider effort by Kyiv to isolate Belarus from the war without treating it as an open battlefield in the same way as Russia. Belarus has remained one of Moscow’s closest allies, and its territory was used in the opening phase of Russia’s 2022 invasion. That history gives the relay-station dispute added weight: if the stations are functioning as Ukraine says, Minsk is not just adjacent to the war, but part of the operating environment that makes strikes possible.

Kyiv had already moved against Alexander Lukashenko over the issue. On February 18, 2026, Ukraine imposed sanctions on Lukashenko in part over what it said was Belarus’s deployment of a relay-station system in the second half of 2025 to help Russian drone strikes. The Ukrainian presidency also said more than 3,000 Belarusian enterprises were supplying Russia with machinery, equipment and components that it classified as critically important.

The latest warning came after Zelenskiy met Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya in Kyiv on May 26, 2026, underscoring that Belarus remains a live political front as well as a military one. For Zelenskiy, the relay stations have become a test of how far Belarus is willing to let its territory be used in Russia’s war, and how much pressure Kyiv can place on Minsk before the dispute hardens further.