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In response to
"so close to getting it: Lukashenko says he told Putin not to kill Prigozhin because "a bad peace is better than any war.”"
by
crash davis 😺
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Days after the mutiny, Lukashenko offers some rare criticism of Putin.
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President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus appeared to offer some rare, if implicit, criticism of his close ally President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday, making his first detailed comments since he claimed to have brokered a deal to end the rebellion by Wagner mercenary forces.
Mr. Lukashenko, an autocratic leader whose country is reliant on Russia for economic and political support, appeared to acknowledge that tensions between Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the Wagner leader, and Sergei K. Shoigu, Russia’s minister of defense, over the handling of the war in Ukraine had been allowed to spiral out of control.
According to Belarusian state media, Mr. Lukashenko said that neither he, Mr. Putin nor Mr. Prigozhin had emerged as “heroes” from the events over the weekend. He said that they had “missed the situation, and then we thought that it would resolve, but it did not resolve.”
Speaking at a ceremony honoring military officers in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, Mr. Lukashenko said that “two people who fought at the front collided,” an apparent reference to Mr. Prigozhin and Mr. Shoigu. For months, the Wagner leader has launched profane verbal tirades against Russia’s military leaders over their conduct of the Ukraine war, often singling out Mr. Shoigu by name.
Referring to Wagner’s brief seizure of the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday, Mr. Lukashenko said, according to state media: “It was painful to watch the events that took place in the south of Russia. Not only for me. Many of our citizens took them to heart because the Fatherland is one.”
He also indicated that he was motivated to intervene in the mutiny because “if Russia collapses, we will remain under the rubble — we will all die.”
Although muted, the criticism was unusual for Mr. Lukashenko, who has been an especially steadfast ally of Mr. Putin since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Mr. Lukashenko, a pariah in much of the world, has emerged as an unlikely beneficiary of the Wagner mutiny. The deal between Mr. Putin and Mr. Prigozhin averted a scenario that the Russian leader had compared to the civil war that erupted in 1917.
Few details of the deal have been made public.
Mr. Lukashenko has managed to hold onto power for 29 years, but at a cost. He has increasingly allowed Belarus to become a vassal state of Russia, especially after getting Moscow’s backing in 2020, when he violently crushed a democracy movement challenging his claim that he had won an election in a landslide.
Belarus allowed Mr. Putin to use its territory as a staging ground for his invasion of Ukraine last year, and as a storage site for Russian tactical nuclear weapons.
In further comments on Tuesday, Mr. Lukashenko suggested that the Wagner mutiny had emboldened exiled Belarusian opposition activists, whom he described as “fugitives.” He suggested that anyone caught supporting them inside Belarus would be punished.
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