“I suggested it was time the Pontiff came to Belarus and met our citizens together with our patriarch. I am sure that more than one million people would like to see that handshake not in faraway Cuba, at an airport, but on land in the center of Europe which, thank God, has been spared the cataclysms [the Pontiff has also emphasized this] that happened in the post-Soviet republics and East European countries after the breakdown of the USSR,” the BelTA news agency quoted Lukashenko as saying after he had met with Pope Francis in the Vatican.

According to the Belarusian president, the Pontiff asked him about the situation in the region, especially in the context of the Ukraine conflict. “I spelled out my position and said that the current condition, the situation in eastern Ukraine required new initiatives, preferably spiritual,” the Belarusian leader said...Read more