Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko reaffirmed his alignment with Russia over its war in Ukraine on Friday, despite highlighting nuances in his own perspective on the conflict.
His comments follow Belarus’ efforts to improve ties with the United States after years of isolation and Western sanctions. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has reopened a dialogue with Minsk, easing some sanctions in exchange for prisoner releases.
“I told [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin openly: I have my own understanding of certain aspects of the conflict in Ukraine, but we’ll always remain committed to our common course,” Lukashenko said, according to the state news agency Belta.
“If you, the Russian leadership, make a decision, we’ll always be with you despite our particular ways of understanding what’s happening there. We’ve never been traitors,” Lukashenko added.
He spoke at a gathering of the governing body of the Eurasian Economic Union, a Russian-led bloc, which includes Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan alongside Belarus.
Twice this year, the president of Kazakhstan has proposed freezing the conflict to restart diplomatic talks.
Lukashenko said that he, like Putin, knows the situation on the front lines in Ukraine, which he claimed allows them both to maintain “more refined approaches” to the war.
Belarus allowed Moscow to use its territory as a staging ground for the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but Lukashenko has said that Belarusian troops would not be sent directly into the war. At the same time, he has intensified military preparations with the deployment of Russia’s nuclear-capable Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile system and announced a “targeted mobilization” of Belarusian forces.
Belarus has also sought to have U.S. sanctions lifted since Donald Trump returned to the White House last year. The Biden administration had introduced many of the sanctions in response to the 2020 election crackdown in Belarus and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
