Could Putin be planning a northern offensive from Belarus? For the past hour, security and defence Michael Clarke has been answering your questions on the Ukraine war. His first question was... Zelenskyy has said Russia is preparing something in Belarus - what could this be? hopethingswillgetbettersoon For context, it comes after Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested Russia was "preparing something" in Belarus this summer. "This summer Russia is preparing something there, under cover of military exercises," the Ukrainian leader told a summit in Poland yesterday, without giving details. "This is how its new attacks usually start," Zelenskyy added. Russia and Belarus will hold joint military exercises in Belarus in the coming months. Clarke says "it may be a northern offensive which the Russians are thinking about". However, he's keen to point out that he thinks it's highly unlikely that Belarusian troops would enter the fray themselves. "The argument is that the Russians have got 65-70,000 troops there - but they normally have quite a lot of troops there," he says. "It is now the campaign season, the weather is favourable to an attack from there - it's plausible," he says, but adds he doesn't personally see something big coming from there based on the material he's seen. However, he reminds us that the last major joint exercises between Belarus and Russia, known as Zapad-2021, were held six months before Russia invaded in Ukraine in 2022. Vladimir Putin was there to watch proceedings at the Mulino training ground in the Russian region of Nizhny Novgorod... Clarke says: "The Russians, working on Belarusian territory, will certainly bring troops to an exercise. But whether they will become assault troops is still not clear - it's plausible, but it's not the most likely thing to happen at the moment." He also says that while the Russians have learned a tremendous amount from the war in Ukraine, Clarke says: "To my mind, they still can't put together an aggressive combined arms operation of the type needed for a very strong offensive - it's just not the way they do things." Read Clarke's answers to all of today's questions here.