The President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, said in an interview with France Press that Russia had managed to acquire two self-propelled howitzers “Cesar” delivered by France to Ukraine, and assured that they were sold to Moscow.
“Do you know that two Cesar systems were sold by the Ukrainian authorities to Russia? In Russia, they are already disassembled at a tank factory and there they are studying how they can be used. This is a fact,” Lukashenko said in the interview.
“Yes, our political system is more rigid and I do not exclude the word authoritarian, but it is not a dictatorship,” the Belarusian president told AFP.
“You say that there are hundreds of people in prison. But if we talk about this so-called opposition that you mentioned, it has nothing to do with a real opposition. It is about people who declare themselves against the state, against their own people,” Lukashenko said .
“You would like to break Belarus in order to build a belt from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea and reach the gates of Moscow,” the president said.
He expressed the opinion that the war in Ukraine must stop in order to avoid the “abyss” of the “nuclear” conflict. “Come on, let’s stop. We must not go any further. An abyss awaits us further. A nuclear war awaits us further. We must not get there,” assured Lukashenko.
He stated that Russian troops are in Belarus with his consent. “Not a single Russian serviceman has arrived here without my invitation or permission. That’s why they are all here with my consent. This is the function of a president,” Lukashenko said, adding: “It’s enough for us that Russia has nuclear weapons. If necessary, Russia will defend Belarus as its territory under a treaty, we have such a treaty.”
“You (France – note.ed.) are an established democracy, an established state, not dismembered, but one that has existed for a long time within its current borders. And how dependent you are, we have now seen. Why do you have such high inflation? Why all the time you shout that you are short of natural gas, oil and so on? We are a young country. We were just a country. And then our economic structure was formed. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economy remained, it did not go anywhere. We developed and perfected everything,” Lukashenko added in his extensive interview.
According to him, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was undertaken with a preventive goal. “I support Russia for getting ahead of you. If the Russian military had missed this moment, they would have had to face a massive strike by NATO troops, not Ukraine. Ukraine is not at war now, it is you: your mercenaries and your weapon. So you are even bigger aggressors than me,” summed up the Belarusian president.
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