He said in a television interview that Russia had formed a security force that could intervene if its neighbor “gets out of control.”
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia gave an ominous warning on Thursday to protesters in Belarus not to push too hard to topple their country’s embattled president, saying that Russia had formed a special reserve force of security officers to restore order in the event of chaos in its western neighbor. Mr. Putin, speaking in an interview with Russian state television, said he had ordered the creation of a “certain reserve of law enforcement officers” at the request of Belarus’s authoritarian leader, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko. He said the force had not been deployed as yet, because “we also agreed that it will not be used unless the situation gets out of control.” Mr. Putin’s remarks laid out for the first time the Kremlin’s view of more than two weeks of protests in Belarus, which he described as “a very close, perhaps the closest country to us.
