Belarus and the Oreshnik: From Lukashenko's 'Any Day Now' to Combat Duty
Alexander Lukashenko spent early 2025 insisting Russian Oreshnik missiles would reach Belarus 'any day now'. They were declared on combat duty on 30 December 2025 — nearly a year later, and not at the site he had named.
Updated 14 July 2026 — this article has been rewritten to reflect the Oreshnik's actual deployment to Belarus in December 2025.
Through the first months of 2025, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko repeatedly told audiences that Russia's Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile would be stationed on Belarusian soil imminently. In January he said the missiles would arrive “any day now” and pointed to Orsha as the likely site; in March he claimed domestically built launch pads were nearly complete and that Belarus was only waiting on delivery from Moscow.
The reality arrived far later, and elsewhere. Russia delivered the Oreshnik to Belarus in December 2025, and Lukashenko declared the system on combat duty on 30 December 2025 — roughly a year after the “any day now” claim. Commercial satellite imagery reviewed by Western analysts pointed to a deployment site near Krichev, in Belarus's Mogilev region — not Orsha, the location Lukashenko had flagged.
The Oreshnik itself is a nuclear-capable, road-mobile missile that Russia first used in combat against Dnipro in November 2024. Its range — enough to reach most of Europe from western Russia — makes basing in Belarus more about compressing NATO's warning time and signalling resolve than about adding reach Moscow does not already have.
What Belarusian “hosting” means in practice is narrow. As with the tactical nuclear warheads Russia began moving to Belarus in 2023, the launchers may sit on Belarusian territory, but the weapons and the release authority remain Russian. Lukashenko's rhetoric casts the deployment as sovereign leverage; the command arrangements make Belarus a launch platform, not a decision-maker.
The episode is also a caution on reading Lukashenko's announcements as a timeline. His “any day now” ran nearly twelve months ahead of the fact, and the site he named was wrong. The question now is whether the Krichev deployment is operational in more than declaratory terms — and how NATO's eastern-flank planners recalculate warning times with an intermediate-range system positioned that far west. Reporting drawn from RFE/RL, PBS NewsHour and The War Zone.