Russia and Ukraine were locked in a serious stalemate in Moscow’s continuing invasion of the country and needed to sit down for peace talks, Belarusian president and Vladimir Putin’s close ally Alexander Lukashenko said.
“There are enough problems on both sides and in general the situation is now seriously stalemate: no one can do anything and substantively strengthen or advance their position,” Mr Lukashenko said.
“They’re there head-to-head, to the death, entrenched. People are dying,” he said over the weekend.
This marks the first time the Belarusian president has come forward seeking truce in the conflict and called for a “stop” command.
"We need to sit down at the negotiating table and come to an agreement," Mr Lukashenko said in a question and answer video posted on the website of the Belarusian state news agency BelTA.
"As I once said: no preconditions are needed. The main thing is that the ‘stop’ command is given," he said.
A geographically closer nation to Russia, Belarus’s territory was used as a launch pad for the Russian preident’s full-scale invasion in February last year. He is also the only international leader to have frequently met Mr Putin since the conflict engulfed Ukraine.
He said that Ukraine’s demands for Russia to quit its territory needs to be resolved at the negotiating table so that “nobody dies”.
In June this year, Mr Lukashenko said his country had started taking delivery of Russian tactical nuclear weapons, some of which he said were three times more powerful than the atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Mr Lukashenko has relied on Russian subsidies and political support to rule the ex-Soviet nation with an iron hand for nearly three decades.
In what is a purported exchange for the strategic ties between Belarus and Russia, he allowed the Kremlin to use Belarusian territory to send troops into Ukraine in February 2022 at the start of the invasion.
Russia deployed forces to Belarusian territory under the pretext of military drills and then sent them rolling into Ukraine as part of the invasion that began last year.
Mr Lukashenko also publicly supported what Mr Putin calls a “special military operation” inside Ukraine, alleging at a meeting with Mr Putin in early March that Ukraine planned to attack Belarus and that Moscow’s offensive prevented that.
He said he brought a map to show the Russian president from where the alleged attack was supposed to take place, but offered no other evidence to back the claim.
The vast war frontline in Ukraine has moved little in the past year despite Kyiv’s gruelling months-long offensive. Major military warfare is concentrated in eastern and southern Ukraine’s pockets.
Ukraine has continuously rejected the proposal of peace talks and imposed pre-conditions that Russia withdraws every single of its military personnel from Ukrainian soil without keeping the territory from where Russian troops fire missiles.
Ukraine said it will not rest until it ejected every last Russian soldier from its territory. It said the invasion was an imperial-style land grab by Russia, the world’s biggest nuclear power.
American president Joe Biden said last year that a direct confrontation between Nato and Russia would mean the Third World War.
On Saturday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said his 10-point peace plan, which includes calls for the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, is the only way to end the war.
