Vladimir Putin awards Alexander Lukashenko with the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle the First-Called, Russia’s highest state award, during their meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, 9 October 2024. Photo: EPA-EFE/SERGEI ILNITSKY
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko offered to host peace negotiations on Ukraine in the Belarusian capital Minsk in an interview with US blogger Mario Nawfal that was published by state news agency BELTA on Wednesday.
Describing US President Donald Trump’s repeated calls for an end to the war in Ukraine as “a brilliant idea”, Lukashenko said he was prepared to invite Trump, Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Minsk where they could “sit down and calmly reach an agreement”.
While Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that the location of potential peace talks had not yet been discussed, he agreed that Minsk would be “the best place for negotiations” as Belarus was Russia’s “main ally”, state-affiliated agency Interfax reported on Wednesday. Neither Kyiv nor Washington officials have commented on Lukashenko’s offer.
Lukashenko also stressed that both Moscow and Washington had to negotiate with Zelensky, noting that “a large part of Ukrainian society” was behind him, contradicting Trump’s earlier claim that Zelensky had a domestic approval rating of just 4%.
In a sentimental turn, Lukashenko said he felt “sorry” for Zelensky, admitting that he had “treated him like a son” before the war broke out, while also claiming that Zelensky had given in “to extreme nationalist forces” and accusing him of doing everything he could “to further fuel the war”.
Using a far less strident tone when it came to Moscow, Lukashenko said he believed that Putin had never expected the war would turn into “a full-blown conflict” with “a huge number” of casualties and that he had attempted to start negotiations early on in the war, which Lukashenko claimed were disrupted by the UK and the Biden administration.
When asked about the natural resources deal that Washington foisted on Kyiv, Lukashenko appeared to briefly take Zelensky’s side: “When this war started, was it agreed that Zelensky would give up rare earth metals in return for arms supplies? Then why should they demand them from him now?”
Lukashenko then suggested that doing a deal on Russian rare earth metals with Moscow would be far more beneficial to the United States than agreeing one with Ukraine, appearing quite happy for Belarus to be left out of any such agreement for now, despite saying earlier this week that Belarusian geologists “need to dig” to see if Belarus has any valuable untapped natural resources of its own.
