Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko praised his close ally Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview on Saturday, as many leaders in the West question whether Putin miscalculated the invasion of Ukraine.
“The West, and you, should get this stupidity, this fiction out of your heads,” Lukashenko said in an interview with TBS, a Japanese television channel, Reuters reported.
“Putin is absolutely fit, he’s in better shape than ever … This is a completely sane, healthy person, physically healthy – he’s an athlete,” he continued, adding: “As they say here – he’ll catch a cold at all our funerals.”
But Lukashenko strongly rejected those assessments and said he is very close to the Russian president.
“He and I haven’t only met as heads of state, we’re on friendly terms,” Lukashenko said during the interview. “I’m absolutely privy to all his details, as far as possible, both state and personal.”
Belarus, a former Soviet Republic, is a close ally of Russia. Lukashenko also echoed a Putin talking point during the interview, calling the dissolution of the Soviet Union a “tragedy.”
“While the USSR existed, the world was multipolar and one pole balanced the other,” he said, according to Reuters. “Now the reason for what’s happening in the world is unipolarity – the monopolization of our planet by the United States of America.”
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