Belarus says it has 1.5 million potential soldiers outside armed forces
Belarus, a small Russian ally bordering Ukraine, has as many as 1.5 million potential military personnel outside its armed forces, a senior official was quoted as saying on Saturday.
President Alexander Lukashenko has supported his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in his year-long war with Ukraine, including by letting him invade from Belarusian territory and by allowing Russia to train newly mobilised troops in Belarus.
Lukashenko this month ordered the formation of a new volunteer territorial defence force of up to 150,000 people. He has said his army would fight only if Belarus was attacked.
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"The structures of the organisations, not the Armed Forces, will amount to somewhere up to 1.5 million people in the event of a declaration of martial law and the switch of the economy to a war mode," said State Secretary of the Security Council Alexander Volfovich, according to the state BelTA news agency.
Belarus has a population of around 9.3 million. The country's professional army has about 48,000 troops and some 12,000 state border troops, according to the 2022 International Institute for Strategic Studies' Military Balance.
