A senior Belarusian official on Tuesday dismissed as fake a claim by anti-government activists that they had blown up a Russian military surveillance aircraft in a weekend drone attack on an airfield outside the Belarusian capital Minsk.
Aliaksandr Azarov, leader of Belarusian anti-government organization BYPOL, was quoted on Sunday as saying that Belarusian "partisans" had used drones to carry out the attack on a Russian Beriev A-50 spy plane.
He did not provide immediate evidence to back his assertion.
"Given the absence of an official reaction, I am deeply convinced that this is another fake (claim) aimed at highlighting certain failures in our national security," Belarusian Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Ambrazevich told Reuters on the sidelines of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in Geneva on Tuesday.
Belarus has allowed Russia to use its territory to launch attacks on Ukraine but has refrained so far from getting directly involved in the war.
The A-50 plane has the NATO reporting name of Mainstay and is an airborne early warning aircraft with command and control capabilities and the ability to track up to 60 targets at a time.
Britain's military intelligence service said on Tuesday that attribution for the attack and damage to the aircraft had not been officially corroborated.
"However, the loss of an A-50 Mainstay would be significant as it is critical to Russian air operations for providing an air battlespace picture," it said in a statement.
"This will likely leave 6 operational A-50s in service, further constraining Russian air operations."
Reached by telephone on Monday, Azarov told Reuters the operation, which he suggested had caused serious damage to the Russian aircraft, had taken several months to plan and that "partisans" would try to carry out more actions in the future.
BYPOL, his organization, includes former law enforcement officers who support opposition politicians. It has been branded a terrorist organization by Minsk.
The Kremlin has declined to comment on the alleged attack.
(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
