Russian President Vladimir Putin, typically keeping an unusual distance between him and others, dressed down the leaders of the five nations allied with Russia who were beckoned to the Kremlin Monday, the Daily Beast reports.
The leaders of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan–along with Russia the entire membership of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the post Warsaw Pact security alliance Russia formed after the fall of the USSR.
Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, whose country Russia used as a second launching point for the invasion and who sent some soldiers into Ukraine, complained to Putin about the suffocating impact of Western sanctions, claiming they were unjust. “Belarus and Russia… are being defamed and excluded from international organizations at the whim of the West,” he said.
“Russia should not fight alone against the expansion of NATO,” Lukashenko said to the other members, accusing other members of not doing enough to support Putin.
In what you’ll hear on Tucker Carlson’s show by the end of the week, Putin said that Russian forces found “documentary evidence” of Ukraine running a chemical weapons laboratory where “components of biological weapons were developed in close proximity to our borders,” so it was in Russia’s national security interest to invade.
“I would like to highlight our priority task of jointly defending the memory of Victory in the Great Patriotic War, the feat of our peoples who saved the world from Nazism at the cost of enormous and irreparable sacrifices, and to counteract any attempts to whitewash the Nazis, their accomplices and modern followers,” Putin said, referring to his claim that Ukraine was being run by Nazis.