Belarusian leader and former collective farm boss Alexander Lukashenko, in a Monday interview, reversed years of tough talk towards Ukraine and unabashed confidence in the Russian army and the Kremlin. In an interview with Al Arabiya republished by the Belarusian state agency BelTA, Lukashenko said Belarus is a peaceful state only interested in a quick end to the war between Russia and Ukraine, and told the Saudi state broadcaster that since his ancestors are buried in Ukrainian territory, Belarusian involvement in the fighting is absurd.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. “Belarusian families live in Ukraine, and Ukrainian families live in Belarus, and in our south. There are joint families – they got married, raised children, and lived like normal people. There was no border,” Lukashenko said. “Ukrainians came to us across the border, and Belarusians traveled freely to Ukraine. I once traveled to Ukraine. Even my roots – my ancestors’ – are buried somewhere between Chernihiv and Kyiv. And are we supposed to throw all that aside, forget it, and start a war? No,” he added. Belarus’s role in 2022 On Feb. 24, 2022, four Russian combined arms armies with some 70,000 men and around 5,000 tanks and other armored combat vehicles rolled across the Belarus-Ukraine frontier to invade Ukraine’s northern Zhytomyr, Kyiv and Chernihiv regions. In the first week of the war, the Russian Air Force operating from four Belarusian military airfields flew a collective 150-200 air strikes a day, against targets in Ukraine or in support of ground operations there.