Putin Awards Lukashenko With Medal on 70th Birthday – Still No Colonel Title

Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded his ally, Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, Russia’s highest state order upon the latter’s 70th birthday on Friday.

Putin issued a decree on Friday morning to award Lukashenko the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle the First-Called for “exceptional merits that contribute to the prosperity, greatness and glory of Russia,” as reported by Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

Putin awarded Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with the same medal on his visit to Moscow in July.

Putin also sent a birthday telegram to Lukashenko, sending him his “heartfelt congratulations” and praising him for being “a wise politician capable of making balanced, far-sighted decisions even in the most difficult situations.”

“It is difficult to overestimate your personal contribution to the development of friendly Russian-Belarusian relations, to the construction and strengthening of the institutions of the Union State, as well as to the promotion of mutually beneficial integration processes in the Eurasian space,” the telegram read.

However, Putin has yet to make Lukashenko a colonel in the Russian Army, an unfulfilled promise according to the Belarusian head of state in a perplexing 2022 interview.

Belarus has been a staunch ally of Russia, particularly after the 2020 Belarusian presidential elections which saw Minsk increasingly isolated from the West amidst election fraud claims and subsequent crackdowns on dissidents.

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Russia had launched its 2022 invasion of Ukraine from Belarusian territories, with Lukashenko recently redeploying his forces to the Gomel region bordering Ukraine in a likely effort to divert Ukrainian troops from other fronts.

Often referred to as “the last dictatorship in Europe” by Western media, Lukashenko’s thirty-year rule of the country which officially began in 1994, has been marred by an endless stream of human rights abuse allegations and political oppression, which his supporters have hailed as the necessary means to maintain stability.