EASTORA REPORT | Alexander Lukashenko believes the Ukraine war is running out of something more decisive than ammunition: endurance.
“The war in Ukraine will end in the coming months. This is my personal opinion,” the Belarusian president said Tuesday in Minsk. “There is no strength left, and there are no resources left. Everyone is exhausted.”
Then he offered an unlikely candidate for helping bring it to an end: Donald Trump.
“Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize,” Lukashenko said. “If the man wants it, give it to him.”
His reasoning was less about Trump making peace than preventing something worse.
Lukashenko argued that, despite policies he acknowledged were divisive, Trump was effectively restraining Europe from an escalation that could turn the Ukraine conflict into a third world war — and ultimately a nuclear confrontation.
The prediction comes at a critical moment. Russia, Ukraine and the United States are due to meet in Abu Dhabi on November 10–11 for their first trilateral peace talks since February, with Washington again trying to narrow the differences between Moscow and Kyiv.
Those differences remain formidable.
Russia is rejecting temporary ceasefires unless what it calls the war’s “root causes” are addressed, while Ukraine has resisted any settlement that rewards Moscow for territory seized by force.
Lukashenko’s argument is that exhaustion may eventually accomplish what years of diplomacy have not.
He also said Vladimir Putin had told him Russia did not intend to drag Belarus directly into the fighting, warning that Belarusian intervention could give Poland, Lithuania and Latvia a reason to become involved.
“If we do not stop now,” Lukashenko warned, continued escalation could lead “inevitably” toward a third world war.
His forecast may prove wrong; he offered no timetable beyond the coming months and no breakthrough capable of ending the conflict.
But after years of failed predictions about when the war would end, Lukashenko is betting on a simpler force.
Not victory. Not surrender.
Exhaustion.