MOSCOW, August 19. /TASS/. Minsk withdrew about 20,000 troops from the border with Ukraine in July but its regular cohort deployed there over two years ago remains in place, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 TV channel.
"When we held the [Independence Day] parade [in Minsk on July 3] <...>, a large number of aerial vehicles came to Belarus to take part in the event. Ground units were also redeployed to Belarus. Clearly, they (the Ukrainians - TASS) saw that. The reason is that the Americans provide them with all the information, as these days, it’s impossible to do this (redeploy troops - TASS) in secret. They saw the redeployment <...> and naturally, they started sending tens [of thousands] of troops to reinforce the 120,000 [Ukrainian service members stationed on the border with Belarus]. In response, I had to redeploy a third of the army to strengthen our forces," the Belarusian leader pointed out, when asked if the order to withdraw troops from the border showed that the situation tended to stabilize.
Lukashenko specified that intelligence and special forces units were stationed on the Belarus-Ukraine border, and noted that the border was "mined as never before."
According to him, Belarus requested clarifications from Ukraine. "We asked them through a communication channel with Ukrainian intelligence agencies: ‘What are you doing?’ They said: ‘You are going to attack us together with Russians from the Gomel area.’ However, we had no such plans. [Later], they withdrew the additional forces they had deployed in addition to the 120,000 troops. And we also pulled our additional units out. This is what happened. But the troops that were deployed on both sides of the border two and a half years ago still remain there. The reason is that it would be a fatal mistake for us to remove our forces from the border with Ukraine," Lukashenko went on to say. "We withdrew the additional forces that had been sent there; that’s almost one-third of our armed forces. I mean the main forces, which don’t include support and logistics troops and so on. Over 20,000 service members were withdrawn. The Ukrainian withdrew troops and we did the same," the Belarusian president stressed.