Vladimir Putin met with Alexander Lukashenko for the first time since the leader of Belarus helped broker a deal to end a mutiny by Wagner fighters.
Whilst sat with Putin in front of the TV cameras in St Petersburg on Sunday Lukashenko implausibly claimed that the Wagner fighters “are asking to go to the West.”
And he then claimed they said: “We’ll go on an excursion to Warsaw, to Rzeszow,” referring to a Polish city less than 100 kilometres from the border with Ukraine.
The rhetoric appears to be a continuation of the ratcheting up of tensions between Belarus and its western neighbour Poland.
Under the mutiny deal many Wagner fighters are now in exile in Belarus where they have been moved near to the border with Poland and are conducting joint exercises with the Belarusian army.
This has led Poland to move its tanks and troops up to the border with Belarus.
Putin has already stationed some nuclear weapons in Belarus and said that any attack on the former Soviet Republic would be regarded as an attack on Russia.