“It’s Uncle Sam overseas who is pushing us into this slaughter. And let’s be frank: many politicians in Ukraine are fulfilling his orders,” the president said

MOSCOW, September 06, 18:06 /ITAR-TASS/. Instability in Ukraine is dangerous for the country itself and for its neighbours, Belarus and Russia, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said on Saturday. Destabilisation in Ukraine has “created a huge funnel and the vortex flows in this funnel are now sucking in both Russia and us,” Lukashenko told Rossiya 1 television.

Read also EU welcomes Minsk contact group’s ceasefire agreement for Ukraine

He blamed the crisis on the United States. “It’s Uncle Sam overseas who is pushing us into this slaughter. And let’s be frank: many politicians in Ukraine are fulfilling his orders,” the president said. Lukashenko stressed the need “to move away from this funnel because the Americans won’t fight there. They want us to get killed with our own hands”. He said West European countries were often acting as a conduit for the American policy in Ukraine and this explained why the Americans had refused to attend the peace talks in Minsk. “They probably did not have to come because there are certain people in Europe who pursue their interests here such as [EU foreign policy chief] Catherine Ashton, and I think she did not take a step against America’s will,” Lukashenko said, adding that French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel also had to go in the wake of the U.S. policy. He also cautioned against overstating the rift between the west and the east of Ukraine. He admitted that people living in western regions both in Ukraine and Belarus were more inclined to develop contacts with Western countries, but “there is no aggressive division” into the west and east among people in either country. Lukashenko said more than 3,000 Ukrainian refugees had found shelter in Belarus since the outbreak of the conflict in the neighbouring country. No peace talks on Ukraine would have been possible without Putin The top-level peace talks in Minsk where the settlement of the Ukrainian crisis was discussed would not have been possible without Russian President Vladimir Putin, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said. “There would have been no meeting without Putin,” he told Rossiya 1 television channel, adding that initially Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had suggested holding the talks in Minsk as the geographical centre of Europe. Lukashenko said he would feel happy if fighting stopped and people were not killed in Ukraine any more.

Read also Putin, Poroshenko laud ceasefire in eastern Ukraine