Mocking the United States for spending billions on intelligence agencies that he said had wrongly predicted an attack on Ukraine, the autocratic leader of Belarus, Russia’s …
Mocking the United States for spending billions on intelligence agencies that he said had wrongly predicted an attack on Ukraine, the autocratic leader of Belarus, Russia’s western neighbor and closest ally, said Thursday that joint military exercises now underway between the countries did not presage an invasion — at least not now. Western officials have warned that the military maneuvers, known as Allied Resolve 2022 and described by NATO as the biggest deployment of Russian troops in Belarus since the end of the Cold War, could serve as cover for an assault on Ukraine, which shares a nearly 700-mile-long border with Belarus. “There will be no invasion tomorrow,” the Belarusian leader, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, told reporters after watching artillery and warplanes from Belarus and Russia put on a noisy display of firepower at a desolate military training ground outside Osipovichi, a small town southeast of Minsk, the capital.
