Ukraine invasion ‘gift’ to West by Vladimir Putin, Belarus president says. Then, explains

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine should be perceived as a "gift" to the West. One of Russian president Vladimir Putin's most trusted allies, Lukashenko said, "Let's face it: we gave them [the West] a gift when we got bogged down in Ukraine." Russian president Vladimir Putin and Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko speak.(AP)

“This is, of course, a gift to them. And here they started clinging to it to bring our space to its knees," the Belarusian president added. Artyom Shraibman, Belarusian political analyst and founder of Sense Analytics consultancy told Newsweek that he believes Lukashenko's reference to the "gift" is an acknowledgement that the unity of Western forces has caused Russia and Belarus to spend more resources on the war.

"In his mind it's basically the West finding the way to help Russia fail without fighting it directly," Artyom Shraibman said. The Belarusian president was likely already too attached to Vladimir Putin to be able to make any other determination than to fight alongside him, the analyst said.

Mikhail Troitskiy, professor of practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek, “His point was rather that before starting the war, Russia and Belarus—and personally Putin, and Lukashenko as a mediator—exhausted all peaceful options to ensure their own security in the face of the western onslaught on China (via Belarus, Russia and Eurasia).”

“Lukashenko puts the blame for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on the rigidity of the Ukrainian and western positions since 2014. He stresses that Ukraine was cheating when it signed the Minsk agreements that Lukashenko supposedly helped broker. [The fact that] Russia got stuck in Ukraine is just one problem that the West rushed to exploit mercilessly, according to Lukashenko," he added.