He called accusations of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov “a product of his sick imagination”.
Kuleba stressed that “Ukraine has never carried out and is not going to carry out any subversive activities against Belarus”.
“On the contrary, Russia has recently declared that it has sent its ‘specialists’ to Belarus and is prepared to send even more. Russia’s attempts to pose its ‘little green men’ (Russian military who carry no identification insignia and who participated in the annexation of Crimea – Ed.) in Belarus as a group of Ukrainian extremists are a cheap and futile trick. Indeed, as a saying has it ‘a thief screams hold a thief’”, stressed Kuleba.
This statement of the Ukrainian minister is a response to allegations of his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov who has maintained that hundred of extremists trained in Ukraine are active in meetings of protests in Belarus. Lavrov said this during talks with Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei on Wednesday, September 2.
According to Lavrov, Ukraine allegedly has specialized camps in the Volyn and Dnipropetrovsk regions where such extremists undergo military training. They are prepared to “destabilize the situation in the Republic of Belarus in order to turn peaceful protests into a hot phase”. He referred to all patriotic and nationalist organizations of Ukraine who are allegedly trained to conduct provocations in neighbouring countries. “All these organizations are engaged actively in instigating civil disturbances in Minsk and other cities of Belarus”, added Lavrov.
Since August 9, mass protests continue in Belarus. Participants in peaceful demonstrations say that results of the voting at the presidential elections have been falsified. The elections were held on Sunday, August 9. Early voting began on August 4 and ran until August 8. In accordance with the official results, Incumbent President Alexandr Lukashenko has won the elections with 80.1% of the vote.
Belorusian riot police and security forces used violence to disperse rallies. More than seven thousand protesters have been detained, hundreds have been injured. The official reports say that four participants in protest meetings were killed.
On August 11, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borell made a statement on behalf of the European Union. He said that “the elections in Belarus were neither free nor fair. And the authorities used disproportionate and unacceptable violence against protesters”.
Meanwhile, Lukashenko claims that the West stands behind mass protests. He promised to protect the homeland shared with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, the homeland that runs from Brest to Vladivostok.
The newspaper Holos Ukrainy
