We’re all one family, say locals in borderland where three nations meet
Atall concrete obelisk marks the meeting point of the three nations descended from Kyivan Rus, the medieval civilisation Vladimir
Putin invokes as the well-spring of his claim to a sphere of influence.
Once, the Three Sisters monument was a symbol of friendship, the site of an annual Festival of Slavic Unity where residents of nearby villages in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine would sing, drink and generally celebrate the ties that bind them.
Now, it could be the starting point of an inter-Slavic war.
“I wouldn’t say we’re worried. We understand perfectly well that in case of a war, it’s the border guards who will face it first,” said Alexandra Stupak, a senior lieutenant at the Ukrainian side of the three-way border crossing here.
“No decent person is not afraid of war. But we are ready – morally and literally,” she said.
A few miles across snow-filled fields and birch woods, Vladimir Putin has deployed tens of thousands of the more than 100,000 strong army that Western governments believe is poised for invasion. Many of them have been sent to Belarus for major war games starting Thursday. Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of Nato, said this week it was “the biggest Russian deployment there since the Cold War”.
Speaking at Nato headquarters in Brussels, he said that Russian troop numbers in Belarus were likely to climb to 30,000, with infantry and armour backed by special forces, fighter jets, Iskander ballistic missiles, and S-400 ground-to-air missiles.
When Russia annexed Crimea and launched its covert war in Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014, Belarus’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, remained firmly neutral.
In keeping with his long-held strategy of balancing between the West and Moscow, he rejected Russian pressure to recognise its seizure of Crimea and instead offered Minsk as a place to broker peace talks.
That strategy ended when Mr Lukashenko brutally crushed postelection protests in 2020, making him a pariah for the West.
With little choice but to throw in his lot with Mr Putin, he has become a ferocious and outspoken defender of the Kremlin’s Ukraine policy and appears to have buckled under long-standing pressure from Moscow for a military presence in his country.
He has allowed Russia to use four airbases, a surface-to-air missile base and 30 storage sites for the exercises. If the Russian forces remain, they will deepen Mr Putin’s leverage over Minsk and pose a permanent potential threat to Ukraine and Nato’s Baltic members.
The new relationship has sent tensions soaring on Ukraine’s previously unguarded Belarusian border.
Tamara is a pensioner who lives with her husband, a cow and a tabby cat in Senkivka, the village closest to the border on the Ukrainian side.
“We don’t think there will be a war,” she said, slipping in and out of Russian and Ukrainian. “They have children too, just like we have children. Why would anyone want that to happen?”
“My granddad was from Belarus. It was perfectly normal to go over there,” she said. The rural communities on all sides of the three-way border have more in common with each other than with their capitals.
This is old Rus, where villages of traditional wooden huts still use buckets to draw water from wells and telegraph poles are top-heavy with enormous stork nests. Locals speak their own mixed dialect of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian.
Many still suffer the effects of a radioactive rainstorm triggered by Soviet cloud-seeding after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
They all suffer the great post-Soviet malaise of rural depopulation as the younger generation leave for the cities.
For each sprucely painted cottage in Senkivka, there is an abandoned wooden izba, its log walls bent and its roof caving in. The local collective farm closed years ago.
It is not war, but the lack of jobs and the departure of the young – her own children moved to Kyiv long ago – that is the real threat to the village, said Tamara.
Since the annexation of Crimea and war in Donbas in 2014, the border facing Russia has been reinforced with an anti-vehicle barrier and a proper fence (to the irritation of locals long accustomed to nipping across open fields to trade or visit).
Drones, and border guards on foot run irregular patrols in the neutral zone between their fence and Russia’s to deter infiltrators and smugglers.
Conscious of how several border guard posts were shelled, overrun and wiped out during the war in Donbas in 2014, a mobile reserve stands ready to respond to the first sign of an attack.
Nonetheless, like in most of Ukraine there was little sense of imminent threat as stray cats pick their way between lorries queuing for clearance to carry their cargoes between all three countries and far beyond.