Photo: RAMIL SITDIKOV / AFP / Getty Images
The President of Belarus, Putin’s ally, Alexander Lukashenko, warned the West that it risks World War III by supplying weapons to Ukraine .
Lukashenko he made the claim when he met in Sochi with the Russian president, whose invasion of Ukraine he has backed.
In a letter to the UN Secretary General, Lukashenko said that Belarus “calls on the countries of the world to unite and prevent the regional conflict in Europe becomes a full-scale world war“.
While Putin and Lukashenko held their meeting, Russian television once again intensified its bellicose rhetoric about the war in Ukraine, warning that Moscow would start a nuclear war rather than accept defeat.
Lukashenko has remained loyal to Putin despite the almost universal condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and both leaders met this week.
In his letter, he wrote to António Guterres that the way guaranteeing peace was for the West to “refrain from supplying weapons, information warfare and any provocation to inflate hate speech in the media.”
Lukashenko’s intervention comes as the head of state-backed Russian outlet RT, Margarita Simonyan, said that Russia would rather unleash a nuclear war than accept defeat in the Ukraine war.
“Everyone thinks we will lose and the West will win”, he said.
“They don’t understand which is impossible. It is simply impossible, it will never happen. Either we win, or this will end badly for all humanity, there is no other way”.
He also said that an attack by the Sarmat nuclear missile, known as Satan-2, would be “enough to destroy the coast” of the United States.
But it would be impractical to bomb the country, since it would be impossible to separate the Russians from the Ukrainians, Simonyan said in a panel discussion on the war .
“If I wanted, couldn’t we have dealt with Ukraine in a matter of hours, not days?” he said.
“ But we are carrying out a special military operation, that is why it is not a war.
“Everyone feels sorry there, we understand that many of them are of our own people who are hostages of those who are not ours.
“We cannot separate them, some here, others there, to attack them with Sarmat ”.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that the Royal Navy could join allies in escorting Ukraine’s grain exports and easing the global food crisis, The Times reported.
The ships would be part of a coalition that would break Russia’s blockade in weeks by providing a “protection corridor” from Odessa across the Bosporus.
The action comes amid a global food crisis and the United States has said it was sending long-range missiles to destroy Russian ships.
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