Lukashenko: Belarus will not be divided and cut, if we appreciate our land and keep our sovereignty sacred

President Lukashenko delivered a speech at the patriotic forum "This is our History!" dedicated to the National Unity Day.

“Dear friends!

Before I make my official statement, I would like to ask you to listen quietly and very attentively to what I am going to say. It has to do with the fact that our people, the Belarusians, perceive the current events in a simple and quiet way. On the one hand, you're right. On the other hand, you cannot even imagine the storm of emotions of not only our neighbors, but all over the world, triggered by the proclamation of this holiday in Belarus.

But one thing is unchangeable: we live on our land, this is our land from those old times, and we will not give this land to anyone.

Today, on September 17, we celebrate the National Unity Day. A day which, in our historical memory, is next to the national holidays of the Great Victory and Independence Day of Belarus, because back in 1939 it predetermined the future heroic deeds of the united Belarusian people.

We have brought back the lost tradition of celebrating the liberation of the western Belarusian lands not only as a tribute to this epochal event. Without this event it would be difficult for us to talk about the Victory. I am not even talking about independence. It is a response to new attempts of the West to divide the Belarusian people alive and to tear the country to pieces. This is an instruction to future generations of Belarusians to remember the lessons of history.

We cannot neglect the fact that we are on the crossroads of geopolitical interests of the leading powers in the world. That is, this holy Belarusian land is the epicenter of all events. It is where this mess has always been created, where the interests of major powers have always collided.

But what about us, what does that have to do with us? So this is the main lesson for everyone, for us, who live in Belarus. We have to remember: if we lose our mind, we will again find ourselves in this terrible political and economic mess in the current redistribution of the world. That is the point. And there is one lesson: we will not be pushed to the left, or to the right, or from East to West, divided and cut, if we live on our land, value it, give it to no one and keep our sovereignty over this territory sacred.

It is in our power today to draw conclusions from the events of the past in order to stand firm and preserve ourselves as a sovereign state. That is why we will remember (it is impossible without it) and remind everyone that in the alliance with the Eastern Slavic neighbors the Belarusian lands were developing in times of Kievan Rus, the Russian Empire and the USSR. And in the embrace of the West, we were perishing, we were rotting as a nation. We were robbed, destroyed as an ethnos both in the era of the Rzeczpospolita and during the 20-year-long Polish rule on our western lands. The lands, which even today Polish elites call their "eastern borderlands". I want us to be Belarusians, I want our children to be Belarusians. And we'll be Belarusians only in our own land.”