Meeting with IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi

Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko met with Director General of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Grossi in Minsk on 1 October.

"The Belarusian people and I are very impressed by your active work, the work of the organization recently. We often see you. We are familiar with your statements and findings. We very positively assess your work related to the security and safety of nuclear power plants, especially those that have found themselves in the war zone - Zaporozhye NPP and Kursk NPP," Aleksandr Lukashenko said.

The President recalled that Belarus has been the IAEA member since the organization was established. According to him, the country always pays special attention to cooperation with the IAEA.

"This is primarily due to the fact that we have become a nuclear power: we have built a nuclear power plant," the head of state explained. "By the way, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that this is the most modern and, I hope, safest nuclear power plant in the world. We built it, figuratively speaking, from scratch. We had no specialists, no experience, and no knowledge of operating a nuclear power plant. But we learned, we trained specialists in time".

"We received great assistance from the Russian Federation and the IAEA," Aleksandr Lukashenko noted. "Our plant is safe, and the experience that we have accumulated in Belarus will be useful for the organization anywhere in the world," the President stressed.

He assumed that more speculations concerning the BelNPP will be generated in the future. "You can see it on the example of Lithuania: they are overly concerned about our NPP and anything that is happening in Belarus in general. But this is politics, let's not talk about it. You should know that we are committed to security and peace. We will do our utmost in order to ensure regional nuclear safety. Please rest assured. We are rational people and we do not rush into any kind of adventures," the Belarusian leader said.

The President added that he had raised the topic for a reason, citing the recent statements made in Ukraine that "Lukashenko wanted to seize the Chernobyl plant".

"I just cannot understand the idea behind such statements. Why may Lukashenko need the Chernobyl plant? We have suffered a lot after the explosion of this nuclear power plant, which, by the way, we did not build, we did not maintain and we did not blow up. A quarter of the Belarusian land suffered the most. We are still doing our best to mitigate the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. I would like to assure you that this is a complete nonsense, which surprised me a lot. We cannot even imagine that we may have to 'seize' the Chernobyl plant and take responsibility for it. There is no such necessity on the part of Belarus. Believe me, the same is true on the part of Russia. There will never be such a need," Aleksandr Lukashenko said.