The Belarusian President's statement that the Ukrainian "counteroffensive" is disinformation was commented on by a well-known specialist, military analyst of the Belarusian Institute of Strategic Research Andrei Chernobay on Sputnik radio.
At a meeting with members of the Council of the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly, Alexander Lukashenko called the announced "counteroffensive" of the Armed Forces of Ukraine disinformation. "There is no "counteroffensive", from my point of view, and there cannot be. It's simply madness," the Belarusian leader said, adding that the escalation and whipping the situation continues to "drown us in this conflict".
"What he (the president of Belarus ― Sputnik) is right about, of course, is that NATO is, in fact, playing with fire today and bringing the world closer to a global conflict. In my opinion, all the events in Ukraine are artificially inflated, since if there were no strong help from the West, the conflict would have been over long ago, some negotiations would have already been held, at least there would not have been such a strong confrontation, such great sacrifices and such territorial losses on the part of Ukraine. But this whole conflict is beneficial primarily to Washington and Brussels, because Ukraine, in fact, is such a smokescreen, behind which you cannot see the actions being taken against Russia, and they are being taken very actively", Andrei Chernobai says.
According to the expert, Belarus has had a difficult period for the presidency in the CSTO, "the Eastern European region, for which we are responsible together with Russia, has become the most tense on the borders of the CSTO," A. Chernobay noted.
"If a few years ago we used to say that a tense region is Transcaucasia, there are conflicts there... and now it is our region, and not only because the conflict in Ukraine has been going on for the second year. But the region is also very interesting from the point of view of the development of the dynamics of the military-political situation, since Baltic states, Poland and Finland are involved… And these are the tasks we have – to ensure peace and security in the region, to make difficult responsible decisions, and the more the CSTO moves in this direction during the presidency of Belarus, the more significant our contribution to these issues will be", A. Chernobay believes.