“If you attack us, I will be the eternal president.” Alexander Lukashenko gave an hour-long interview to CNN

The shortest retelling

We in Belarus have never fired at point-blank range even at radicals. I only know of one case where a protester was killed, but he came to kill himself. And all the rest - someone died from covid, from asthma, from oncology. But in the US Congress they shot a girl - is that not a violation of human rights? And you are hushing it up. An atmosphere of fear in Minsk? Lies. Have you walked around Minsk yourself? Our people at CNN don't want to talk because you're misrepresenting information all the time. It seems that you have come to accuse me of something - apparently you have such a task. I'm not going to be president until death, but if you attack us, I'll be president forever. I'm still young, not like you in the Washington regional committee.

There are no Russian military bases in Belarus, only two civilian ones. But if you need to resist your aggression, the whole of Belarus will turn into a single military base. We will build our future with Russia, and even you will not be able to stop us. You have Anglo-Saxon thinking, but we never bargain with the Russians over money, we are fraternal peoples. Nobody forced Tikhanovskaya to flee the country, she herself asked to be taken to the border. The landing of the Ryanair plane was not an intelligence operation - it's your fantasy. I can personally guarantee the safety of flights over Belarus, but if we see a threat to the state, we will immediately land any aircraft. If you don't want to fly, we'll get by. We lived without the EU and will live for many more years. What we need to sell, we will sell to Russia and Asia.

This is a rough retelling of Alexander Lukashenko's interview with CNN. Quotations, including those in the first person, are not necessarily verbatim.

Cover photo: Mikhail Metzel / TASS / Scanpix / LETA