Lukashenko says he has to protect ‘majority’ who voted for him: ‘If I fall, those with me will be torn apart’
The embattled Belarusian president says he cannot cave in to the demands of anti-government protesters, because otherwise his legacy would be destroyed and his supporters violently persecuted.
Alexander Lukashenko has no intention of standing down from power now because too much is at stake, he said in an interview to Russian media, RT among them, on Tuesday.
I have to defend what has been created by our hands, protect the people who helped create it, the majority that voted for me.
The president is facing enduring mass protests over the outcome of last month’s election. He won it in a landslide, according to official results, but the opposition said the election was rigged and demanded his resignation. The government responded with a controversial heavy-handed police crackdown, stirring public anger and prompting thousands to take to the streets.
Lukashenko claimed, contrary to the opposition’s messaging, that if his opponents win, people who work for him will face violence and persecution.
Those riot police boys and others who are with me… What’s their fault? And they [opposition] will tear them apart.
The president reiterated his claim that the protests were organized by foreign forces which presumably fuel them through social media.
“How do you counter those channels on Telegram? Can you block them? Nobody can, even those who invented this [world wide] web, the Americans.” He added that Russia will be targeted with a similar attack soon if Belarus falls.
Lukashenko said many of the people supporting the protests in Belarus are too young to remember what the situation in the country was like over two decades ago when he first took power. Asked about his plans for eventual retirement, he said he may stand down, but his primary concern now is “not to allow everything we created with the people, with those generations, to be destroyed.”
The Belarusian leader gave the interview to journalists from five leading Russian media outlets, including RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan. The full conversation is to be published later.
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