The people of Ukraine will eventually recognize that the US and its allies have treated them as cannon fodder, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has said.
In an interview with Russia 1 TV released on Sunday, Lukashenko argued that Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has lost the support of ordinary Ukrainians and that most of the “rabid nationalists” who once set the agenda in Kiev have died by now.
“When they realize that they were simply used and then they were dumped, once the Ukrainians realize it, they will come to us,” Lukashenko said. “We are going to rebuild everything that has been destroyed but to a higher standard.”
According to the president of Belarus, the West wants to turn Ukrainian men into cannon fodder and their women into sex slaves.
“Beautiful Ukrainian women are simply making a living through prostitution. And men get used any way they [the West] want,” Lukashenko said. “Now they want to deploy them to the front line.”
Close to three quarters of Ukrainians “hate Zelensky,” Lukashenko argued, “because he promises one thing and does another; because people are dying.” The former actor was elected president in 2019 on a promise that he would find a peaceful resolution of the conflict with the Donbass republics, but quickly ended up adopting the same hostile policies as his predecessor.
Lukashenko said he had warned Zelensky that the West is fickle. A new president in the US might “refuse to honor old arrangements,” and even if the UK gives him enough money to buy a mansion somewhere, odds are Ukrainian intelligence would assassinate him as a traitor, the Belarusian leader claimed.
As an example to Ukrainians of what not to do, the president of Belarus pointed to Armenia, whose government has recently turned to the US and France.
“But what kind of policy is that?” Lukashenko said. “France? [Emmanuel] Macron? Macron will be gone tomorrow and everyone will forget about Armenia. Just the way it happened to Afghanistan” when the US withdrew, he added, referring to events from three years ago.
According to Lukashenko, the Russia-Ukraine conflict will end eventually and normal relations will be restored.
“Time will come. Listen, the war against the Germans was also fierce. But we’d been friends with these former fascists until recently,” he noted, referring to World War II. “We worked together. We found the basis for it. Can’t we restore our good relations? We will restore them.”
However, if Kiev continues to escalate matters – such as with the recent incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region – Ukraine may be completely destroyed, Lukashenko warned.