Belarus Weekly: Belarus drops out of the top 20 global arms exporters
Russia proposed building a drone factory in Belarus with an annual capacity of 100,000 units.
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko appoints new government ahead of his seventh 'inauguration.'
Belarus cracks down on the unemployed amid workforce shortages.
UN experts urge Belarus to end the incommunicado detention of political prisoner Siarhei Tsikhanouski, after two years of him being hidden from the public eye.
Belarus drops out of the top 20 global arms exporters, SIPRI report finds.
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Russia has proposed to build a drone factory in Belarus capable of producing 100,000 drones every year, the press office of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko reported on March 6.
Deputy Head of the Russia Presidential Administration Maxim Oreshkin made the offer during a meeting with Lukashenko at a military exhibition in Minsk, the press office said. The drones will reportedly be built using Russian licenses.
'It's very important that Belarus has its own (drone) production facilities, which would strengthen both its economy and national security,' Oreshkin said.
'We're ready to build the plant. We guarantee: you wouldn't be able to build it in Russia the way you could build it here,' Lukashenko said in response.
The announcement does not specify whether the plant will produce military drones. Yury Kozarenko, a member of the Russian delegation, said that drone production in Belarus could contribute billions to Belarus's GDP, as drones are also used in agriculture, logistics, and education.
A staunch Kremlin ally, Lukashenko has repeatedly claimed that Belarus needs to prepare for war and adapt to modern warfare. The Belarusian Defense Ministry reported on Nov. 15, 2024, that it was developing military drones domestically. By the end of 2025, the Belarusian military is expected to have 'a wide range of combat drones,' including a 30-kilometer range 'Chekan-V' and 'Peacemaker' with a reported 10 kilogram warhead and a 100 kilometer range, according to the Head of Application and Development of the Unmanned Aerial Systems department of the Belarusian army, Mikhail Bransky.
Currently, Russia uses around 100 to 200 Iranian-developed Shahed-type kamikaze drones in its daily attacks on Ukraine, Vadym Skibitskyi, the deputy head of Ukraine's military intelligence agency (HUR), said on March 3. Russia plans to increase the number of drones and sites from which drones will be launched, he added.
Since July 2024, Russian drones have crossed into Belarusian airspace with increasing frequency. Some of them have crashed in the vicinity of residential areas, although so far without causing casualties.
Minsk has never publicly objected to Moscow over these incursions, and local authorities tend to conceal incidents and provide no comment.
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, not yet officially inaugurated as president following the Jan. 26 sham presidential elections, has appointed a new government, naming Alexander Turchin as the country's new prime minister.
Lukashenko began his seventh consecutive term as president amid widespread repressions and in an atmosphere of fear, human rights activists report. The Belarusian autocrat maintained his grip on power by brutally suppressing nationwide protests that engulfed the country following fraudulent 2020 presidential elections.
Turchin, the new prime minister, was appointed on March 10, after previously serving as head of the Minsk regional executive committee. He is under EU, U.K., Swiss and Norwegian sanctions over the suppression of mass protests in 2020.
Following the appointment, Turchin told reporters that Belarus would not see any 'significant course correction,' adding that his approach would be one of 'evolution without revolutions.'
His predecessor, Raman Halouchanka, was transferred to the position of head of the Belarusian National Bank. While announcing the appointment, Lukashenko called for the bank and the government to 'find common ground' in terms of financing the economy.
Analysts say the appointment of Halouchanka will weaken the bank's monetary policy, as the former prime minister lacks a background in finance.
Lukashenko has previously ordered government interventions in the economy, and was forced to subsidize struggling state-owned enterprises.
Inflation risks are mounting, according to Beroc, the country's leading independent economic think tank. In 2024, inflation was reined in to 5.2% with the help of heavy government regulation of consumer goods pricing. If the restrictions were to be relaxed, inflation would accelerate to 6-8%, experts believe.
Lukashenko presented the official appointments as the advent of a 'new generation' in Belarusian leadership. However, the government consists largely of the same ministers, except for Uladzimir Karanik, formerly the chairman of one of the Regional Executive Committees, who was appointed deputy prime minister, and Kiryl Zalesky, the former head of the High-Tech Park information technology development initiative, who became minister of informatization.
Political analysts do not foresee any real changes, saying that in general, the appointments were an 'old system masquerading as new.'
Belarusian authorities are attempting to remedy the country's current labor shortages by targeting the unemployed with a special tax, independent Belarusian media have reported.
Belarus in 2015 adopted a Soviet-style decree requiring working-age citizens without formal employment or income to pay an annual fee of about $200. Dubbed 'the tax on parasitism,' the measure sparked mass protests and was suspended in 2017. It came into effect again three years later, replacing the direct tax with the obligation to pay the full cost of household utilities, which are typically subsidized by the government. Currently, the rate is five times higher for those considered 'parasites.'
In February 2025, Belarus's Interior Minister Ivan Kubarkov announced raids against 'deadbeats' — the working-age citizens who have not been officially employed for a long time, have no declared income, and don't pay taxes. The announcement followed Lukashenko's claim on Jan. 21 that it was necessary to bring more unemployed people back into the labor market.
Throughout the first weeks of March, Belarusians in Minsk were summoned en masse to the employment administration and questioned regarding their sources of income. The exiled Belarusian news outlet Nasha Niva reported that summons were delivered even to those who had left the country decades ago.
Belarus is grappling with a serious labor shortages: the state jobs database currently lists 188,700 vacant postings, a significant amount for a nation of 9.5 million with an estimated 4-4.5 million workforce. Healthcare alone faces a shortfall of 10,000 workers. Up to 57% of employers in Belarus reported experiencing a shortages of staff, according to the independent research center rabota.by. The Eurasian Development Bank foresees further wage increases in 2025, fueled by competition over scarce labor.
The natural aging of the population in Belarus is being exacerbated by the mass emigration of the most economically and politically active population, the economic think tank Beroc reports. By various accounts, between 300,000 and 500,000 Belarusians have left the country since 2020, after that year's fraudulent elections triggered massive protests and a subsequent crackdown on public protests.
At the same time, former political prisoners are not being offered jobs, and workers are being dismissed for supporting an opposition candidate in 2020. On March 3, Lukashenko reiterated his demand that people who participated in protests should not be hired, slamming them as 'the enemies of the state.'
Sixteen United Nations human rights experts issued a statement on March 7 demanding that the Belarusian authorities disclose the fate and whereabouts of former presidential candidate and political prisoner Siarhei Tsikhanouski.
The jailed activist, who sought to challenge Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko in the 2020 presidential elections, has been held incommunicado for the past two years.
Among Belarus's 1,200 political prisoners, nine leaders of the 2020 pro-democracy movement remain fully isolated from the outside world in what's known as an incommunicado regime. The human rights community considers the regime to be a form of enforced disappearance that amounts to torture.
The UN experts, including Chair-Rapporteur of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances Gabriella Citroni, Special Rapporteur on Belarus Nils Muižnieks, along with other experts, urged Belarus to enable contact to be restored with Tsikhanouski and other opposition leaders, such as Mikalai Statkevich, Viktar Babaryka, Maria Kalesnikava and Maksim Znak.
'The enforced disappearance of Mr. Tsikhanouski and others is a blatant violation of international law,' the experts said.
'These actions seek to silence political opposition and instill fear.'
While acknowledging that there had been releases of political prisoners in Belarus recently, the experts noted that these had been selective and came with conditions to cooperate with law enforcement and propaganda.
Blogger and entrepreneur Siarhei Tsikhanouski is serving a nineteen-and-a-half year term in prison. Arrested in May 2020, two months before the election, he was charged with obstructing the public's electoral rights, organizing riots, and inciting hatred.
While in prison he was given an additional 18-month sentence for allegedly disobeying the penal colony administration. His lawyers and family have not received any information about him since March 2023.
Belarus has dropped out of the world's top-20 arms exporters, according to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) published on March 10.
Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Belarus quickly became a major arms exporter, ranking 11th globally. Between 1999 and 2006, the country reportedly earned an estimated $1 billion by selling off the arsenal it inherited from the collapsed empire, prompting the U.S. Congress to pass a motion, which required annual reporting on Belarusian arms exports.
Belarus had remained in the 20th position since 2019 despite a 37% decline in exports. Meanwhile, its arms imports, coming exclusively from Russia, grew by a third. In recent years, Serbia, Vietnam, and Uganda have been the top buyers of Belarusian weapons.
Belarusian arms deals have drawn scrutiny, with multiple media investigations conducted into Lukashenko's close circle of businessmen, Alexander Zingman and Oleg Vodchits, for facilitating arms sales to African countries.
On March 7, the head of the military government of Myanmar, Min Aung Hlaing, was in Minsk to discuss arms supplies, the exiled Myanmar Mizzima News Media reported.
Belarus backed Russia in its aggression against Ukraine but has abstained from sending its troops to the battlefield. Experts attribute Lukashenko's reluctance to an overwhelming anti-war consensus domestically, which might cause massive unrest in Belarus while not providing much help to Russia on the front line.
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