Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has stated that he has no plans to authorize the deployment of Belarusian military in neighboring Ukraine. «I have already said a thousand times that there are no such plans,» he insisted Friday during an official event.
Lukashenko, who has visited a biotechnology center, has repeatedly defended his increasingly close alliance with Moscow will not result in a joint military operation on Ukrainian territory, a recurrent fear of Kiev during these last months.
«We have nothing to do with Ukraine. We don’t need to send people to fight there,» the Belarusian leader said, according to the official BelTA news agency.
Belarusian authorities, who put the number of Ukrainian refugees who have crossed the border since February at some 63,000, have justified recent military moves – including a joint deployment with Russian forces – as purely defensive, in the face of threats allegedly emanating from neighboring countries.
Ukraine’s president, Volodimir Zelenski, has denied that his troops pose the threat Lukashenko claims and, faced with the possibility that the Belarusian leader is looking for some kind of excuse to intervene, has even proposed the deployment of an international observer mission.
