Фото: пресс-служба Лукашенко
Alyaksandr Lukashenka, during a visit to the Horizont plant, spoke about how he had warned Vladimir Putin about assassination threats.
According to Lukashenka, it was he who dissuaded Putin from traveling to the BRICS summit in South Africa in August 2023, when the Russian president was already packing his bags.
“Last night I thought about something… I recalled a conversation with Putin. If I’m not mistaken, it was before BRICS in South Africa. He’s packing his bags. I say: ‘Where are you going?’ — ‘What do you mean, don’t you know? We have BRICS.’ I say: ‘Are you really going to fly there?’ It was such a friendly, brotherly conversation. To an older brother: ‘Are you really going to fly there?’ — ‘Well, they asked, they’re waiting for me there.’ I say: ‘What are you doing! There’s a war going on!’ — ‘Well, they’re not that crazy anymore, not that crazy.’ I say: ‘And you think everyone there is in their right mind? No point going there!’ Lavrov flew then. Maybe not because I pressured him. But I expressed my opinion to him.
But it wasn’t just some, you know, village talk. Our intelligence — good for them, they’ve been working quite well lately — informed us. At the level of conversations, gossip from the West, that a terrorist act against the president of Russia was being prepared,” Lukashenka said.
Lukashenka claims that he often warns Putin about danger and advises him not to fly anywhere.
“And I often tell him: ‘Well, there’s a war going on, well, there’s no need to fly there. If someone needs to see you — they will fly to you. He invited us to St. Petersburg. His closest friends flew there. Others will fly too. Xi Jinping will fly in, people from Iran and from other countries will come. But one has to be more careful. These people cannot be trusted. But, I say, you know better — you worked in this field, this is your field (the Chekist one), you know better.’ There was some kind of not carelessness, but a loss of a certain vigilance,” Lukashenka said.
Lukashenka believes that the West is deceiving Putin and wants to remove him.
“And today I thought about how right I was when I warned him and cautioned him. It is clear that all of them in the West understand: remove Putin — and everything will be different. This must be taken seriously. I am talking about this for the first time today, because one must not be careless. They deceived him, and he himself admits this, constantly,” Lukashenka said.
He also recalled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and claimed that Putin had been deceived by Catholics and Jews.
“The first months and even weeks, when Russian troops were in Kyiv. And then Catholics, Jews — there were these two powerful clans — were at the forefront: ‘Oh, we need to end the war…’ And Putin says: ‘Yes, we need to end it.’ We punched each other in the face, let’s stop. — ‘Yes, Vladimir Vladimirovich, well, we need to withdraw the troops and that’s it, we’ve reconciled, we’ve stopped.’ Did we stop? No, we did not. That means you cannot believe them,” Lukashenka concluded.
Lukashenka also commented on Russia’s statements about an alleged attack on Putin’s residence, threatened Ukraine with Russian strikes on decision-making centers, and urged Volodymyr Zelenskyy to reach an agreement.