MINSK, 9 October (BelTA) – At a meeting to discuss urgent issues on 9 October, Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko unveiled new details of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya's decision to leave for Lithuania, BelTA has learned.
The head of state noted that during the election campaign and at the onset of the street actions, the protesters sought one thing that they lacked: a sacred sacrifice. It could have been former presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. However, at her request, the woman was taken to Lithuania just in time, Aleksandr Lukashenko said.
“That citizen of Belarus and housewife Tikhanovskaya has forgotten that the president of Belarus saved her,” the head of state said.
Recalling those days Aleksandr Lukashenko said that it was late in the evening when he summoned KGB Chairman Valery Vakulchik (later he was appointed State Secretary of the Security Council) and instructed him to “dispatch the most efficient unit from the streets to the opposition headquarters”. Otherwise, a disaster would have happened, the president said.
“We ordered the Alpha special operations team to change clothes and to let the opposition know that we had taken their headquarters under control. Fifty foreign journalists had been brought there together with Tikhanovskaya and others. Among the so-called security detail of Tikhanovskaya was a former police officer or a member of some other law enforcement unit. He called the Ministry of Internal Affairs as he was alarmed that so many people gathered in one house,” Aleksandr Lukashenko said.
According to the president, 120 security officers were involved in the crime prevention operation. “The plan was to set the headquarters on fire and blame the authorities for it,” he explained.
According to the head of state, on the following day Svetlana Tikhanovskaya asked for a meeting with the minister of internal affairs, about which minister Yuri Karayev reported to the president. “I sent two people there: his first deputy and the head of the Operations and Analysis Center. In general, she voiced only one request: “Please, tell the president that I want to leave Belarus: there will be a disaster”. We realized that there could be a disaster. And I ordered to fulfill her request and take her to Lithuania to her children, under escort and accompanied by the people she asked for. When she said that she had no money to live there, I ordered a state-run enterprise to give her $15,000. “She cried and said ‘thank you so much' as she left the country,” Aleksandr Lukashenko noted.
At the same time, the Belarusian embassy in Lithuania was instructed to help Svetlana Tikhanovskaya with the relocation, including with accommodation. “But she was quickly taken over by the Lithuanian special services. You know the rest,” the president added. “This sacred sacrifice did not happen, but what if it did? No one pushed her [Svetlana Tikhanovskaya] outside the country. It was a matter of life and death, and it was her wish,” Aleksandr Lukashenko noted.
