Did Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin sign an agreement to annex Belarusian territories to Russia? No, that's not true: The Republic of Belarus is an independent country and no such pact has been signed at the time of this writing.
The claim originated from a video (archived here) published on TikTok by tomilovzelenskiy on May, 26, 2023.
The text on the video, translated from Russian to English by Lead Stories staff, reads:
Urgent!!! Belarus is Russia now
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue May 30 10:45:52 2023 UTC)
The agreement the video refers to is not related to absorbing Belarusian territory: it is, specifically, a plan to deploy Russian tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of Belarus, which Minister of Defense of Belarus Viktor Khrenin and Minister of Defense of Russia Sergei Shoigu confirmed on May 25, 2023.
Nuclear weapons were withdrawn from Belarus after the 1991 Soviet collapse as the United States had provided security guarantees.
In the video, the TikToker quotes a statement by Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, pronounced during the Supreme Eurasian Economic Union meeting in Moscow on May, 24, 2023. Raising the issue and explicitly mentioning the nuclear weapon agreement between Belarus and Russia, he said:
We have a Union State in the EAEU, which is a unique phenomenon in world political history -- a state based on the formula 'Two countries - one state' with a single political, legal, military, economic, monetary, cultural, and humanitarian space. It has a single union government and parliament. Even nuclear weapons are now one for two.
In December 1999, The Republic of Belarus and the Russian Federation signed the Union State Treaty, establishing a framework for a partnership on several fields, but still maintaining the sovereignty and territorial independence of the two countries.
No agreement, though, has been signed as of this writing to annex Belarus to Russia, as claimed by the TikToker.
