Zelenskyy says Belarus halted relay stations aiding Russian drone attacks

Belarus halted the relay stations Ukraine said were helping Russian attack drones navigate, but the episode still leaves open a sharper question: whether Alexander Lukashenko’s government crossed into active operational support for Moscow or preserved a calibrated layer of deniability.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the stations stopped operating on June 22 after Ukraine’s military and intelligence services briefed him. Two days later, he told journalists it remained unclear whether the equipment had been physically dismantled or merely turned off. Ukrainian border guards also reported fewer Russian attack drones entering northern Chernihiv Oblast, and large Shahed raids along the Belarus-Ukraine border had ceased.

Zelenskyy first went public on June 19 and June 20 with a direct demand that Belarus remove the relay equipment within one week. He said the stations were helping Russia guide drones during strikes on Ukrainian regions and warned that Kyiv would act itself if Minsk did not. Ukrainian officials said the hardware consisted of relay or signaling equipment mounted on communications towers in Belarus’s Brest region and Homyel region, and that at least four Russian relay stations had been moved there.

The significance lies in what the hardware does. A relay station can strengthen or stabilize the signal path used to guide a drone, making navigation more precise over longer distances or in contested airspace. In practical terms, that turns Belarusian territory from a passive launch corridor into a support layer that can improve the effectiveness of Russian attacks without requiring Belarusian troops to enter the war.

That is why the issue carries more weight than a narrow border incident. Belarus has long been one of Moscow’s closest allies and allowed Russian forces to use its territory to launch the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. If relay stations inside Belarus were feeding Russian drone operations, Minsk would not be firing the drones itself, but it would be providing a piece of the infrastructure that makes them harder to misdirect and easier to land on target.

For Kyiv, the pressure options are narrower than the rhetoric. Zelenskyy’s public ultimatum showed one lever: expose the support network and force Belarus to choose between keeping it visible and shutting it down. His warning that Ukraine would act itself suggested a second lever, though one that risks widening the conflict if it moves from warning to direct action against the equipment or the sites that host it. The shutdown reported on June 22 suggests that, for now, the pressure worked without pushing Belarus fully into the war.