MINSK. March 7 (Interfax) - The perpetrators of a sabotage at the Machulishchi airfield in Belarus have been detained, it was a Russian citizen recruited by Ukrainian security services in 2014, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said.
"The president told us about the detention of a terrorist of the Ukrainian security services and his accomplices involved in an attempted sabotage of the A-50 plane at the Machulishchi airfield in Belarus," the First Man's Pool Telegram channel close to the Belarusian presidential administration said on Tuesday.
The BelTA state-run news agency provided details of the incident. "The Security Service of Ukraine, the CIA administration plotted an operation against the Republic of Belarus either from the side, or behind the back. A terrorist was trained. He is Russian with a Russian passport, and he also has a Ukrainian passport. He was born in Krivoi Rog and lived in Crimea. He also has relatives in Austria and some in Kiev. He was recruited by the Security Service of Ukraine sometime in 2014. He is either an IT specialist or a person who knows IT technologies well. He was trained to commit terror attacks," BelTA quoted Lukashenko as saying.
The saboteur was trained by the Security Service of Ukraine, Lukashenko said. "What we saw while accomplishing the operation in Belarus was really something improbable. The highest technologies were used. He was trained to do all that for months. After the training, he was routed (as the KGB says) to our territory," he said.
The border with Russia was closed to detain the saboteur, Lukashenko said.
"Before the trip to China (you must have guessed), the strictest instructions were given to law enforcement agencies. The Belarusian border was closed. We realized that our biggest problem was the Belarusian-Russian border. We have no military units there. There is actually no border between Russia and Belarus. Our main task was to prevent him from infiltrating Russia," BelTA quoted Lukashenko as saying.
"The thing is that it would have been extremely difficult to track him down in vast, bottomless Russia. We realized that, so hundreds or even thousands of people, military from all units, were alerted to close Belarus. Certain actions were taken, and an antiterrorism staff led by Belarusian KGB chief Ivan Tertel was deployed," Lukashenko said.
The Belarusian Foreign Ministry said earlier that reports of an attack on an airfield near Minsk in late February, in which a Russian A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft was allegedly damaged, were fake.
Back then, the Kremlin declined to comment on the A-50 sabotage reports.
Later on, the Belarusian state-run television channel Belarus 1 showed a serviceable A-50 moving along the runway, and the Belarusian media released footage of its takeoff the following day.