President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko actually accused Russia of forcefully seizing Crimea.
He mentioned this when listing the problems of the CIS countries that Belarus avoided, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“You see that we are being torn apart. The only post-Soviet country that has not seen grief.
And some Belarusians think that Ukraine was destroyed far away. There is a war going on. They chopped off part of the territory. Somewhere far away is Moldova, which was divided in half: Transnistria and the western part...
They forgot that Georgia lost almost a third of its territory: first Abkhazia, then South Ossetia,” Lukashenko said.
He positively assessed the experience of the Central Asian republics in suppressing popular unrest by force and promised that he, too, “would not give up the country.”
“Nobody knows how my friend Rakhmon, with a machine gun at the ready, entered the capital of Tajikistan, Dushanbe, in order to restore order. How many people died there? How they fought bearded men. They forgot how former President Karimov suppressed the coup in Andijan, shooting thousands of people. Everyone condemned him when he died - they were on their knees, sobbing, crying.
We haven’t experienced this, so we don’t want to understand it. Some. Well, then we’ll remind you!” - said Lukashenko.