Opinions & Interviews

Lukashenko: We don’t want what belongs to others but we won’t give up ours either

MINSK, 17 September (BelTA) – Belarus has no territorial claims against anyone but will not surrender its own land to anyone. Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko made the statement in a speech during the youth forum Youth. Belarus. Future on the occasion of People’s Unity Day, BelTA has learned.

The head of state recalled the forceful division of Belarus in 1921 and the country’s reunification some time later.

“Our army back then (we were part of the Russian Empire) suffered a crushing defeat in Poland in autumn 1920. We lost that war. Poles came out on top with the assistance of all the Western states, naturally. It is also a lesson,” Aleksandr Lukashenko said.

The president remarked that politicians were smart enough to come to terms and sign the Treaty of Riga in 1921. Frankly speaking, it still had negative consequences for Belarus. “Half of Belarus [with the population of] about 3.5 million people was cut off and given away. We were always told that it was necessary to save the country, this is why Western Belarus and the western part of Ukraine were sacrificed. They were simply given away to Poles,” the head of state stated.

“In 1939 without any wars the Red Army liberated Western Belarus and Western Ukraine,” the president said. In his words, in this manner it reclaimed everything that had been surrendered to the West when Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was in power.

“We reclaimed ours. I emphasize it and say it because a campaign has been recently launched in Poland: ‘Stalin was such a bastard. The government was not normal. They made a deal with Nazi Germany, with Hitler and split Poland.’ We didn’t split anything. The Soviet troops reclaimed what belonged to Belarusians and to the huge country where we lived. We reclaimed that,” Aleksandr Lukashenko stressed. “This was the situation back then if we have to be objective and it is how we understand it nowadays.”

“We didn’t capture Polish lands. If Germans and Nazi occupied them back then [during World War Two], then you should lodge complaints with them today. Poles lodge complaints with everyone now, including with Germany. They demand another wave of reparations. Well, god willing,” the president said.

The head of state also remarked that in 1939, in the period of reunification Belarus did not regain the borders it had had before. “The circumstances happened to be that way. And we don’t lay claims to lands in [Russia’s] Smolensk Oblast or some other oblast. On the other hand, we don’t lay claims and don’t make demands concerning Bialystok, the Vilnius area, and so on and so forth,” the head of state noted. “Within borders of today’s Belarus we recognize that this is our land.”

“As long as I am in power, there is one formula: we don’t want what belongs to others but we won’t give up ours either,” the Belarusian leader stressed.