“I think this demonstrates — which was what the military exercise demonstrated, too — that it is Moscow, not Belarus, not Minsk, that runs things on its territory. And it is Moscow, not Minsk, that makes decisions on who goes where,” she said in an interview with LRT Radio aired on Friday morning.
Lukashenko received an invitation to the Eastern Partnership summit, but sent his foreign minister to Brussels.
Grybauskaitė underlines that Lithuania’s relations with Belarus are complicated due Minsk’s military cooperation with Russia, particularly the Zapad drills held earlier this autumn, as well as the nuclear power plant that Russia’s state corporation Rosatom is building in Astravyets, some 40 kilometers from Vilnius.
According to the president, Rosatom “conceals information and is not a transparent builder” and Lithuania will continue to seek a “full-fledged” SEED mission by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on the Astravyets site.