President Aleksandr Lukashenko stated that Putin partially regretted the decision to invade Ukraine, because the conflict escalated into a full-scale war with extensive NATO intervention, which Putin did not anticipate.
He stated that Putin had hoped for a quick overthrow of the Ukrainian government and a demilitarization of the country in order to protect the Russian speaking minorities in Ukraine, but that after realizing the high number of human casualties, the Russian President inclined towards negotiations and reaching an agreement to end the war.
Furthermore, Lukashenko stated that it was Ukraine and the West that have been avoiding peace negotiations since the beginning of the war in 2022, and that only now they are starting to negotiate, due to their worsening position on the battlefield, while Russia had made gestures towards peace as early as several months after the start of the war.