Former SBU official: Lukashenko unlikely to order invasion of Ukraine
Alexander Lukashenko and Vladimir Putin (Photo: Pavel Bednyakov/Pool via REUTERS)
While self-proclaimed Belarusian president Alexander
Lukashenko remains in power, he will not cave to Russian pressure to order
an invasion of Ukraine, retired Maj. Gen. Viktor Yahun, former deputy chief of Ukraine’s
SBU security service, told NV Radio on May 18.
Yahun suggested that Russia might be preparing sabotage groups in Belarus or staging a false-flag provocation there to put pressure on Lukashenko.
"Something is being prepared there; but as long as Lukashenko is in power, he will not give the order for a large-scale invasion of Ukraine," he said.
Yahun acknowledged that for the past several years, Moscow has been seeding the information space with rumors and fabricated stories suggesting Belarus was about to invade Ukraine. This time around, he suggested, there seems to be genuine clandestine Russian activity in Belarus.
“There is a lot of information about the situation in Belarus, many layers of it,” said Yahun.
“But we must understand that the Belarus vector is a real threat, not just a psyop. It started as one, but eventually became a real threat, which, for now, remains dormant.”
On May 15, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy
said Russia continued attempts to draw Belarus into the war against Ukraine. He
said possible scenarios included aggressive operations targeting Ukraine’s
Chernihiv-Kyiv direction or one of NATO’s member states.
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