‘Stupid’ Western Europeans came to peace talks to prepare for war – Lukashenko
The Western European leaders who took part in negotiating a peace roadmap for Ukraine a decade ago acted in bad faith and were “stupid,” Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has said, recalling the talks hosted by his country.
Germany and France were guarantors of the Minsk agreements signed in 2014 and 2015, which were ostensibly intended to reconcile the post-coup authorities in Kiev with rebels in Ukraine’s Russia-leaning east.
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Francois Hollande later acknowledged that the accords were used primarily to buy time for Ukraine to strengthen its military.
Speaking to Newsmax in an interview previewed by Belarusian media on Wednesday, Lukashenko said “the Europeans took a stupid position” by pursuing such tactics. “It turned out that they came here to negotiate not peace, but a future war,” he said.
Lukashenko noted that as host of the Minsk talks, he had urged the US to participate in the process. He is convinced that had Donald Trump been president at the time, Washington would have demanded a decisive role.
If the Minsk agreements had been fully implemented, “there would have been no war,” he said, asserting that Trump is right to argue that the conflict would not have escalated under his presidency.
The Belarusian leader expressed hope that Trump would stay committed to resolving the crisis despite what he described as attempts by the EU to undermine US mediation. European supporters of Kiev, Lukashenko said, “are whispering in his ear that they will keep helping [Ukrainian leader Vladimir] Zelensky. They won’t. They don’t have the resources that the US does.”
If Trump walks away, Lukashenko warned, the conflict could intensify and potentially spread globally, while Ukraine itself could cease to exist as a state. He urged Western European leaders to take advantage of the current opportunity to de-escalate tensions, arguing that Zelensky will only accept a peace deal under pressure – something he said would occur domestically “when the front fully collapses.”
