Lukashenko: Belarus is preparing for war

Belarus and its authoritarian president Aleksandr Lukashenko are among Vladimir Putin’s closest allies. When Russia went to full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022, Lukashenko let Russian forces attack through Belarus to take Kyiv.

Now Lukashenko says that Belarus itself is preparing for war.

This is reported by the independent Russian media Meduza and the Ukrainian newspaper Kyiv Post on Tuesday afternoon.

– Don’t believe anyone who says we want to go to war. We are preparing for war, and I say it bluntly. If you want peace, you must prepare for war, Lukashenko is said to have said, according to media citing the state-run Belarusian news agency Belta.

However, the president must be clear that the country does not want war, but that preparations are necessary.

– We don’t need to threaten anyone. We don’t want other people’s land.

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Military units are trained

He also says that Belarus is training military units and distributing new weapons and equipment to its country’s military forces.

– If unfriendly countries want to whine and criticize us, they should just know that we are doing the right thing. If they started praising us, it would be bad news.

It is not known which weapons and equipment are involved. In its arsenal, the Belarusian forces have a lot of equipment of Soviet and Russian origin.

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Met Putin

At the end of January, Lukashenko and Putin met to discuss further cooperation between Belarus and Russia.

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– It is important that we have cooperated closely in the international arena and shown each other unfailing support in a time of external pressure on Russia and Belarus that we have never seen before, Putin said when he received Lukashenko in Russia in January.

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In December last year, Lukashenko claimed that work on deploying Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus had been completed.

An authoritarian regime

Lukashenko has been president of Belarus since 1994 and is tough in dealing with political opponents in the country. Many are imprisoned for political reasons.

Putin and Russia have been singled out as decisive factors in Lukashenko’s ability to hold on to power.

As a result of the war in Ukraine and the political situation in Belarus, a number of Western countries have introduced sanctions against the country.