Lukashenko: Russia should return its land to Kazakhstan and Mongolia.
In an interview with Kazakhstan's 1612 Internet television channel posted on October 5 Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka flatly condemned Russia's bid to redraw international borders in Europe.
Lukashenka argued that once the process of rearranging borders according to historical claims begins, there is no end to it -- and Russia might end up disappearing if the borders of the medieval Mongol-Tatar Yoke are revived.
"Then we would have to give Mongolia to Kazakhstan and someone else would get practically all the territory of Russia and Western Europe and Eastern Europe -- except for Belarus," he said. "They made it to us somehow but they didn't bother us. So what is the point of returning to what was in the past? We can't be dicing up the borders again. "
He added that Europe's current borders are reinforced by numerous international agreements that cannot be ignored and should not be nullified.
Although he was speaking mostly of the current conflict between Kyiv and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, his observations seem equally applicable to Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in March, to Russia's recognition of the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and Russia's support of the separatist region of Transdniester in Moldova.
Watch the video here (in Russian):
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