It’s sad to watch Belarus slipping away into anti-Ukrainian narratives and Kremlin’s designs, Ukrainian Ambassador says

January 31, BPN. “It’s sad to watch Belarus gradually slipping away into the anti-Ukrainian narratives and ‘designs’ of the Kremlin,” Ukrainian Ambassador Ihor Kyzym commented on Aliaksandr Lukašenka’s message to the nation and the parliament on his Facebook page.

According to the diplomat, this is “not good for the Belarusian sovereignty and statehood and even less so for the friendship of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples.”

He drew attention to Lukašenka’s saying “we would return our Ukraine back into our Slavic core.” “If this ‘WE’ refers to Belarus, then it is obvious that we represent the ‘Slavic core’ (by the way, together with Poles, Bulgarians, Slovaks, and others) and we do not need to return there, as we have never left it,” wrote the Ukrainian diplomat (the author’s style preserved). “If this ‘WE’ refers to A. Lukašenka and V. Putin, and ‘OUR Slavic core’ refers to the union of Belarus and Russia, then soon it would be difficult to speak about Russia as a ‘Slavic’ state at all, and many generations of Ukrainians would not want to return to this ‘core’ (or, more correctly, to the union), formed by the country that seized the Ukrainian Crimea, unleashed and continues the war in Donbas, where tens of thousands of Slavs fell victims. It is an indisputable axiom and there is nothing to prove.”

Commenting on Lukašenka’s statement “If you want peace, prepare for war,” Kyzym said: “If we had prepared for war, had not signed the Budapest Memorandum, had not disarmed, had not believed in bilateral agreements with Russia and many other “if”, then surely we would not be at war now and would not have lost our soldiers, citizens, and territory.”

In this regard, the Ambassador wondered against whom Belarus was preparing to go to war. “If we analyze the recent statements of the Belarusian military, it comes out that, among other things, it would be against Ukraine, which (especially the National Guard of Ukraine), according to them, has become a new threat from the south to the Belarusian state,” wrote Kyzym. “This is why Belarus is planning to deploy its military contingent in the south. Of course, this is the right of every state… The question is what regular Russian military units would be doing here in the near future, 20-50 km from the border with Ukraine.”

“Allegedly they (Russian troops – BPN) arrived for joint exercises to protect the territory of Belarus from ‘invasion’ of NATO troops from the part of the NATO-occupied territory of Ukraine. This is not a joke and not a play on words. This is the ‘plan’ announced recently at a briefing at the Belarusian Ministry of Defense for the exercise Union Resolve 2022, for which Russian troops arrived from the Far East to participate,” he added.