The Minsk Dialogue Council on International Relations presents a new monitoring product, Minsk Radar. In many respects, it is the successor to the Council’s long-running project, the Minsk Barometer, which analysed Belarus’s foreign policy across five dimensions, as well as the state of security in the region.
Radical changes in the regional security situation have called for new approaches and methods of analysis. Nevertheless, the monitoring remains grounded in the quantification of events and in the aim of moving away from subjective assessments of developments by relying predominantly on quantitative research methods.
Minsk Radar analyses the dynamics of the military and military-political situation in the region around the Suwałki Corridor — a complex junction of the borders of the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) and the CSTO that is often described as a potential focal point of military danger. Hostilities in Ukraine have been deliberately excluded from the monitoring, as they require more specialised examination; their impact on the situation in the region is, however, taken into account indirectly.
Each quarter, the monitoring collects and analyses events in Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast that affect the escalation or de-escalation of tensions between military-political blocs. Each event is assigned a numerical value depending on the degree of its impact. The resulting indices make it possible to judge the direction and speed of the region’s movement along the escalation ladder.
The pilot issue covers events in June 2026. Its main objective is to test the research methodology and to refine it in the course of subsequent expert discussions. The full text of the issue, the catalogue of events with links to primary sources and a detailed description of the methodology are available in the PDF version.
