RUSSIA: Putin's Ukraine drone barrages are increasingly backfiring on his closest ally

LONDON -- "Europe's last dictator" -- as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has often been termed -- thus far appears to have kept his nation out of the worst of the spiralling war engulfing his neighbors to the east and south.

The 70-year-old provided invaluable material and political support for Russian ally President Vladimir Putin in his war on Ukraine, even offering Belarus as a launchpad for the doomed Russian drive towards Kyiv in the early stages of the full-scale invasion.

Since then, Russian forces have used Belarusian territory to launch ballistic missiles into Ukraine. Belarus houses bases at which Russian troops train for battle and hospitals where they recover.

Minsk even now hosts Russian nuclear warheads and Lukashenko brokered the short-lived settlement between the Kremlin and Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin after the latter's ill-fated 2023 mutiny.

As the war in Ukraine escalated and the enmity between Moscow and its Western rivals deepened, Lukashenko's apparent hesitance to fully commit to the conflict seems to have bought him some level of freedom from retaliation.