YEREVAN — A group of Armenian activists gathered outside the Belarusian Embassy in Yerevan on Wednesday morning to condemn Alexander Lukashenko’s latest anti-Armenian statement. They threw eggs, potatoes and tomatoes at the embassy gate during the protest.
“You don’t decide who needs the Armenians. Thank God, we don’t need you and you don’t need us either,” one of the protesters, Ruben Mehrabyan, said, appealing to the Belarusian leadership.
Lukashenko mocked Armenia and denounced its political leadership for seeking closer ties with the West in an interview with Russian state television aired earlier this week.
“Who needs the Armenians besides us?” he said. “No one needs them. Let them develop their economy and focus on what they have.”
Later in the day, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry summoned the Armenian charge d’affaires in Minsk to condemn “the act of vandalism” against its mission and demand that Armenian law-enforcement authorities punish its perpetrators. It also criticized the authorities for not preventing the incident.
Yerevan recalled the Armenian ambassador in Minsk for consultations on June 14 one month after Lukashenko made fresh pro-Azerbaijani statements during a visit to Azerbaijan. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan declared that he and other Armenian officials will not visit Belarus as long as Lukashenko remains in power. The Belarusian Foreign Ministry scoffed at the move, saying that Pashinyan wants to deflect public attention from massive anti-government protests in Yerevan.
During his May visit to Azerbaijan, Lukashenko said that he had not only been aware of Baku’s plans to try to reconquer Nagorno-Karabakh by force but also approved them during his meetings with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev held before the 2020 war. The Belarusian strongman, in power since 1994, has long raised eyebrows in Armenia with his pro-Azerbaijani comments on the Karabakh conflict and arms sales to Baku.
