Context: On the night of January 3, 2026, the U.S. military detained Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife and transported them to the United States. He is accused of narcoterrorism and drug trafficking. The following day, Donald Trump threatened several more countries — Cuba, Iran, Colombia, and Mexico. The U.S. president said he was prepared to strike Mexican drug cartels and offered Cuba an immediate oil deal.
CTV host Ryhor Azaronak reacted to the U.S. military operation "Absolute Resolve," during which special forces captured President Nicolas Maduro. On the program "Slovo i Delo," he claimed the West is planning an attack on Belarus using Poland and Lithuania.
"The West desperately needs full control of the Baltic, and that is already aimed at us. I'm not exaggerating. The military budget of tiny Lithuania is 10 times larger than ours this year. I won't even mention Poland — it's hundreds of times higher," Azaronak said on air January 3, 2026.
Earlier, in the New Year's edition of the project "Letuchka" on SBTV, he also spoke on this topic:
"Then there's the 5.5% of GDP that Lithuania will spend on armaments next year. That is nearly €6 billion. In our case, for context, we have about $600 million for all national security. That includes the police, the Ministry of Emergency Situations, and everything else that falls under national security. For them, $5 billion is money for weapons, money for war. ... Poland is spending 49 billion — that's a massive, terrifying amount of money. Our total GDP is 25 billion. That is just a massive amount of cash."
To summarize Azaronak's claims: tiny Lithuania spends 10 times more on defense alone than large Belarus spends on defense, law enforcement, and the Ministry of Emergency Situations combined, while Poland's spending is hundreds of times higher, exceeding the entire GDP of Belarus. The Weekly Top Fake team fact-checked this and found that the host significantly exaggerated the defense spending of neighboring countries.
In total, the Belarusian national budget allocated about €2 billion for law enforcement, which includes the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the police, and the courts, and €1.3 billion for the army. This brings the total to 6.3 times more than Azaronak claimed.
Lithuania's military budget is indeed about €5 billion. This is not 10 times more than Belarusian security spending, as Azaronak stated, but approximately 1.5 times more. If you compare only army to army, excluding the police and the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Lithuania spends at most four times more than Belarus.
As for Poland, the difference there is not hundreds of times over either. Warsaw's defense spending is 36 times higher than Minsk's. They do not exceed the Belarusian GDP because the volume of the Belarusian economy is not €25 billion, as Azaronak claims, but €80 billion.Poland's defense budget does not exceed 5% of the country's GDP.