Intelligence agencies of several countries, including Poland and Ukraine, are training volunteers to overthrow the Belarusian government, the Belarusian KGB has claimed.
Konstantin Bychek, the organization’s deputy head of investigations, warned of a “secret Western training program for Belarusian volunteers” aiming to overthrow the government in Minsk.
“We know the identity of the officers of the special services who train them,” said Bychek, as quoted by the Russian news agency TASS. “We know the funds that finance terrorist activities under a credible pretext,” he added.
According to Belarusian intelligence, the volunteers are first trained by Polish and Ukrainian special units and then sent to Ukraine where they are tested in combat and gain the necessary experience.
They later return to Belarus where they prepare for “terrorist attacks and develop plans for an armed invasion of Belarusian territory, including with the support of regular units from those countries.”
The KGB representative said that the Belarusian services have the ability to eliminate the threat, and that “fugitive terrorists and the Western collective behind them have no chance.”
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko stated in early June that Western countries, particularly Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, are training “members of illegally armed groups” to overthrow him. He also claimed that attempts to create “spying extremist cells” are being made within Belarus itself. “We see this, and we will not allow it,” he warned at the time.
Lukashenko supports Russian President Vladimir Putin in the conflict with Ukraine, and Belarus is implicated as an aggressor because it allowed its territory to be used for launching the invasion of Ukraine by Russian armed forces on Feb. 24, 2022.
