The Daily Populous Wednesday December 17th, 2025 morning edition
Authored by united24media.com and submitted by UNITED24Media

The presence of up to 360,000 Russian troops in Belarus has drawn renewed attention following warnings from Roderich Kiesewetter, a foreign policy expert from Germany’s CDU party, who said 2026 and 2027 will be critical years for regional security.

Speaking on German broadcaster n-tv on December 16 in an interview with journalist Pinar Atalay after recent talks in Berlin, Kiesewetter, who served as a colonel in the German Armed Forces until 2009 and spent several years working at NATO headquarters in Mons, Belgium, said Russian leader Vladimir Putin is assembling hundreds of thousands of troops in Belarus, a country bordering NATO.

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According to Kiesewetter, Russia currently maintains two army corps in Belarus—between 350,000 and 360,000 combat-ready soldiers. Their presence has raised particular concern in the Baltic states and other neighboring countries.

Kiesewetter warned against “naively believing that if we meet here in Berlin now, Putin will realize that at some point he will have to tell his population: the West is now ‘ready for war’ (…) and that all of this was not worth it.”

"If we survive them [critical points in 2026-2027—ed.]—through our ability to defend ourselves, but also by not frightening our population, but rather saying: Attention, this could happen, let's be careful—then we will have survived it," he said.

Kiesewetter noted that the presense of two army corps in Belarus is “worrying, especially in the Baltic states,” and that Putin is conducting the war “not particularly successfully militarily in Ukraine,” but, through a wartime economy, is training “hundreds of thousands of soldiers who are never deployed in Ukraine.”

Previously, German drone maker Quantum Systems and Ukrainian UAV manufacturer Frontline Robotics have announced the creation of a joint venture aimed at scaling up production of Ukrainian combat-proven drones for the country’s defense forces, according to Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi on December 15.

wellmana on December 16th, 2025 at 20:10 UTC »

Why would Russia keep 360k combat-ready troops out of their current 4-year slog in Ukraine? That doesn’t make any sense? ELI5 me.

babarjango on December 16th, 2025 at 17:50 UTC »

That’s significantly more than the ~190k troops they gathered for the initial 2022 invasion.

Chrono_Convoy on December 16th, 2025 at 17:39 UTC »

Y’know in Civ when there’s a massive military on your border and the AI claims they’re “passing through”

That’s not what they’re doing.