“There's always a choice. And Putin may have had that choice. But it's not even so much about NATO expansion to the East, it's about the threats that were created in Ukraine. After all he did not attack Belarus in response to NATO eastward expansion. He did not attack Belarus. That could also have been a response to NATO expansion. He attacked or invaded, as you say, Ukraine. Why? Because that's where he saw the threat to Russia and that's where the threats were publicly made against him. That's one of the big reasons for what happened,” Aleksandr Lukashenko said.
Mario Nawfal asked if Vladimir has regrets about what happened.
“We haven't talked about it, but I know him well, Putin didn’t expect it would turn into such a war. Otherwise he would not have agreed to the negotiations back then. When he saw a huge number of people dying, Putin instantly agreed to the negotiations to stop the conflict, to negotiate both on NATO, on demilitarization, on denazification, as he described it, on not killing Russian speakers, on not cracking down on the Russian language in Ukraine. It was all on the agenda. He wanted to negotiate when he saw what it had turned into. So I think he probably regrets it turning into such a full-scale conflict, a war, which he probably did not expect,” the head of state noted.
