It appears the Belarusian people have little appetite for involving themselves in the ”special military operation”. AFAIK they’re already suffering suffering under many of the same sanctions as Russia.
Belarus has already given Russia a bunch of military hardware including tanks, combat vehicles, artillery, missiles, etc. The amount of active equipment they claim vs how much is likely active are probably two very different things- much like in Russian. And what they do have is dated, Soviet Era stuff.
Their annual defense budget for the past decade has been around $700m… minus the money that goes to corruption. One would infer very little maintenance has been happening, new and sophisticated equipment is not being purchased, and perhaps most importantly- little quality training is occurring.
I would think at the the end of the day Belarus doesn’t have much to give except people- allegedly ~48,000 active soldiers. If Belarus attacked Russia, presumably most/all of their soldiers would have to defend their own 1000km border with Ukraine. Likely reserves and/or conscripts be drawn up but they probably don’t even have the necessary equipment in the proper numbers to sustain this, maybe even initiate it. Belarus attacking only serves to distract Ukraine and seemingly gains nothing except perhaps a little more affection from a pariah state with increasingly less and less to offer others.
It’s also worth noting Belarus preformed extremely poorly in WWII. More than 25% of their population was killed (almost 2.5m people or about 15% of all WWII deaths).
I can’t blame the Belarusian civilians or government for having zero interest getting involved, even if they do have positive feelings towards Russia or support Russia’s invasion.
