A senior Belarusian official on Tuesday dismissed as false a claim by anti-government activists that they blew up a Russian military surveillance plane in a drone attack on an airfield near the Belarusian capital Minsk, Reuters reported.

The leader of the Belarusian anti-government organization BYPOL, Oleksandr Azarov, said that Belarusian “guerrillas” carried out an attack on the Russian Beriev A-50 reconnaissance aircraft with the help of drones.

He did not immediately provide evidence to support his claim.

“Given the lack of official reaction, I am deeply convinced that this is yet another false statement aimed at highlighting certain miscalculations in our national security,” Belarusian Deputy Foreign Minister Yuriy Ambrazevych told Reuters on Tuesday on the sidelines of the UN Conference on Disarmament. in Geneva.

• PHOTO. What is known about the A-50 Mainstay radar damaged by partisans in Belarus and why Minsk is silent

Belarus has allowed Russia to use its territory to attack Ukraine, but has so far refrained from directly participating in the war.

The A-50 is named Mainstay in NATO reports and is an airborne early warning aircraft with control capabilities and the ability to track up to 60 targets simultaneously.

Britain’s military intelligence service said on Tuesday that the attribution of the attack and damage to the plane had not been officially confirmed.

That would be a significant loss

However, the loss of the A-50 Mainstay would be significant because it is important for Russian air operations to provide a picture of the combat airspace, the British Ministry of Defense said in an assessment on Tuesday.

This would likely leave six operational A-50s in service, further limiting Russian air operations,” British military intelligence said.

Azarov told Reuters by phone on Monday that the operation, which he believed caused serious damage to the Russian plane, had been planned for months and that the “guerrillas” would try to carry out more actions in the future.

The BYPOL organization includes former police officers who support opposition politicians. Minsk classified it as a terrorist organization.

The Kremlin refused to comment on the alleged attack.

A Russian general, a collateral victim of an attack by Belarusian partisans?

In Russian Telegram channels, a video appeared in which the senior officer of the Russian troops in Belarus, Lieutenant General Oleksandr Matovnikov, performs a striptease, filmed by the commander himself.

Independent analyst and researcher Chris Owen notes that a faction of the Russian state appears to have resorted to the “traditional” method of compromising an opponent by leaking a video of him in an awkward position.

Chris Owen says the release of the footage is likely intended to create more trouble for Matovnikov in the context of the operational failures that allowed Belarusian guerrillas to attack the Machulyshchi airbase outside Minsk on Sunday, during which a Russian warplane was shot down.

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