President: Belarus ready to do its utmost for peace in Ukraine

MINSK, May 7. /TASS/. Belarus will be prepared to do its utmost for the sake of restoring peace to Ukraine, President Aleksandr Lukashenko said at a special ceremony on the occasion of the 70th Anniversary of the Soviet People’s Victory in the Great Patriotic War.

"Belarus has already done a great deal for the sake of restoring peace to the land of Ukraine. And we shall be prepared to do a whole lot more to this end - everything that might be necessary for stopping that war," he said.

The Belarusian president warns that these days "70 years after World War II one can feel the smell of war blaze in Europe again."

"The most terrible thing, something the victors, as well as the millions of those killed and tortured to death and burned in Nazi concentration camps could have never thought of, is that we, their descendants, would be firing shots at each other and that brother would be set against brother. All that has happened on a land soaked with the victors’ blood. What a terrible ‘surprise’ for the dead and for the living. What a terrible pain for the veterans who are still with us!"

"A thousand-year-long common history has bonded together three brotherly peoples: the Belarusians, the Russians and the Ukrainians. The tragic events in a brotherly neighboring country are a common pain of ours," Lukashenko said.

"By and large we have proved bad successors to those who won that war. We have failed to preserve the integrity of the country they had defended. Moreover, we have unforgivably permitted a war to be unleashed on Slavic soil. The sooner we take every step to end it and repent while the veterans are live, the better for our generation," Lukashenko said.