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Putin’s Top Ally Lukashenko Seems To Hint There’s A 1% Chance He Could Turn Against Russia

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The president of Belarus and loyal ally to Vladimir Putin claimed this week he could not accept 99% of the proposals for him to turn against Russia.

Alexander Lukashenko alleged that “some from the outside” are encouraging him to turn against Moscow and start backing Ukraine.

In an address on Tuesday – shared on both the official Belarus government website and Russian state news agency TASS – he said: “Some from the outside are giving us advice, throwing in ideas and urging us to back down here and give something up there.

“The idea is that we should forget about Russia and turn away from Russia.

″‘Go fight against Russia together with Ukraine,’ they say, ‘and we will deploy NATO forces close to [the Russian city of] Smolensk.’

“This is how far it gets. I’m receiving proposals from all sides, and 99% of them we cannot accept,” he said – suggesting he could be persuaded to accept that narrow 1% of the proposals being pitched to him.

At the meeting of Belarus’s teachers’ Council, he suggested he wanted Belarusians to understand the situation they are in.

He then said: “Do your thing and I will do mine together with my colleagues in the government and other senior officials.”

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Lukashenko complained that the West is trying to persuade him to fight with NATO against Russia.

He also added that he receives \"proposals from all sides that I, 99%, cannot accept.\"
Did he mean Russia and NATO by \"all sides\"? pic.twitter.com/DVa7NZ1nql

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) August 27, 2024

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Lukashenko complained that the West is trying to persuade him to fight with NATO against Russia.

He also added that he receives “proposals from all sides that I, 99%, cannot accept.”
Did he mean Russia and NATO by “all sides”? pic.twitter.com/DVa7NZ1nql

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) August 27, 2024

The suggestion Lukashenko could be wavering, even just in that 1%, over his loyalty to Putin is eye-catching, especially as Belarus agreed to host nuclear weaponry on Moscow’s behalf.

Russia has been pretty isolated on the world stage since invading Ukraine in 2022, with many nations in the West condemning the war as a land grab.

Lukashenko, though, has publicly advocated for Putin, claiming only in January that Russia “bears the greatest burden in the world” and suffers “more than anyone else”.

Like Putin, he is known for his authoritarian rule and eliminating the political opposition – making the two leaders natural allies.

However, when mercenaries from the now-dissolved Wagner group attempted to stage a coup last year, it was Lukashenko who managed to stop it in its tracks.

According to specialists from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) at the time, this pulled Putin and Lukashenko into a bit of a “power play”.

A year later it seems as though the Russian president is still on top – but, crucially, Belarus is still not actually at war with Ukraine.

Troops are building up the border between the two countries, but, as the ISW claimed on August 26, Lukashenko is still not going to risk combat with Ukraine which “could weaken his regime or drastically increase Belarusian discontent.”

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