Photo: Website of the President of Belarus
State Border Guard the Ukrainian service announced that the number of weapons seized on Ukraine's border with Belarus had decreased in six months. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko's statements on arms smuggling from Ukraine are therefore unfounded.
According to statistics, Ukrainian border guards seized 27 weapons in the six months on the border with Belarus, not a single firearm. At the same time, in the same period of 2020, another six weapons were seized at the Ukrainian-Belarusian border.
In addition, the website recalled that the Administration of the State Border Service of Ukraine and the State Border Committee of Belarus are exchanging “impersonal statistical information on operational and service results”. According to data provided by the Belarussian side, in the first five months of 2021, they detained only four weapons and 10 ammunition on the border with Ukraine for entry and exit.
In general, during the preparation of joint reports on the results of last year, the Belarusian border guards recorded a 6.9-fold decrease in the number of detected weapons on the border with Ukraine during the period under review.
Belarus's State Border Committee has previously announced an increase in the number of border patrols at the state border with Ukraine. According to Anton Bychkovsky, the department's official, border guards are serving “in an expanded version.” He said that illegal shipments of weapons came from the territory of a neighboring state.