The Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko implicitly acknowledged, during a youth forum held on Wednesday in Minsk, that if the West had succeeded in overthrowing him in 2020, Russia would have invaded Belarus in the same way it invaded Ukraine in 2022.
The statement, reported by the Belarusian state agency BelTA and shared in a 36-second video, was delivered to young people gathered for National Unity Day.
«They tried to tear us away live from Russia: that's what they attempted to do in 2020. And if they had succeeded, we would have what is happening now in Ukraine, a rich, powerful, and strong country. They tested you and me. It didn’t work out for them,» the leader stated.
The statement is not explicit: Lukashenko does not say that Russia would have invaded Belarus, but rather that the fate of his country would have been "what is happening now in Ukraine." The inference, however, is straightforward: if he had yielded to the protests and Belarus had distanced itself from Moscow, the Kremlin would have responded with the same logic it applied against Kiev.
The background is the political crisis of August 2020, when the Belarusian presidential elections triggered massive protests demanding Lukashenko's resignation.
The opposition, led by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, denounced electoral fraud and called for new free elections. Russia supported the dictator, and the protests were crushed.
Two years later, Moscow justified its invasion of Ukraine—initiated on February 24, 2022—by citing "demilitarization" and blocking Kyiv's accession to NATO. The international community rejected these justifications; analysts point out that the real cause was Russia's rejection of Ukraine's Western orientation and the desire to restore its influence over the country.
What makes Lukashenko's declaration unique is that, by making it, he is admitting something that the Kremlin has never articulated openly: that a government's loyalty to Moscow is a condition for not being invaded.
The Belarusian dictator —in power since 1994 and having begun his seventh term in March 2025— added that the American representatives with whom he has dialogue "never told me" directly that they wanted to distance Belarus from Russia, although he understood that implicit objective. "But I must acknowledge that the American delegation never said that to me," he noted.
The statement arrives at a paradoxical moment. A day before the speech, Belarus released 25 political prisoners as part of negotiations with the U.S. envoy John Coale, in exchange for relief from sanctions. Since March, the regime has released more than 400 political prisoners in total as part of that process.
This double game —publicly denouncing Western intentions to its domestic audience while negotiating privately with Washington— defines the strategy of the longest-serving dictator in Europe.
Analysts describe their stance as «tactical distancing, not strategic independence»: Lukashenko seeks to expand his diplomatic leeway without breaking away from Moscow, on which he continues to rely for his political survival.
Lukashenko himself summarized that dependency with a phrase that sounds like a warning to both the West and his own people: "The Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China are two countries that are outside of the parentheses; they are not to be discussed."
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