Directly contradicting public claims by President Alexander Lukashenko that Belarus has remained neutral in Russia’s war against Ukraine, a new investigation has found that nearly 900 wounded Russian soldiers — including some suspected of war crimes — were secretly treated in Belarusian hospitals.
Using leaked data from Russia’s Main Military Medical Department, journalists from the Belarusian Investigative Center (BIC), in collaboration with RFE/RL and the Ukrainian hacktivist group KibOrg, established that 898 soldiers received treatment across the Homel region during the early stages of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Medical records, battlefield documents, and civilian testimonies confirm that facilities in Homel and Khoiniki treated members of elite Russian units, including the 16th Guards Spetsnaz Brigade and the “Kubinka-2” Special Purpose Center.
Among the wounded were paratroopers involved in the failed assault on Hostomel’s Antonov airfield, riot police linked to civilian executions there, and soldiers from Buryatia suspected of firing on fleeing civilians along the Zhytomyr highway.
One of those treated was Aleksandr Kvitko, commander of a Pskov airborne unit, who was hospitalized in Homel with shrapnel injuries. Ukrainian investigators have tied him to atrocities committed in Bucha, including the killing of a local pensioner.
While the Geneva Conventions permit neutral countries to treat wounded soldiers, this does not in itself guarantee neutrality. Human rights lawyer Kateryna Rashevska argues that Belarus’s military medical support, alongside its hosting of Russian troops and facilitation of cross-border attacks, undermines its claims of neutrality and could amount to complicity in Russian aggression.
