“The decision, taken 20 years ago, to establish territorial defense forces has proved right. The project was large-scale and quite expensive. I had my concerns about the viability of this decision. Today, we can see that we did the right thing. We needed to do this,” said Aleksandr Lukashenko.
According to the president, uniting local authorities with the population strengthens the country's ability to counter external and internal threats. “We have done a lot to develop territorial defense. The military report to me that a lot has been done to improve the ways of carrying out different tasks, ensure coordination of actions of various enforcement structures, improve the efficiency and sustainability of the territorial defense management system. Officials, from governors to commanders and privates of territorial troops, undergo necessary training,” the head of state said.
The work is underway to ensure the availability of weapons, hardware and material resources for the needs of territorial defense of cities and regions. “The weapons we have are in good condition in general. We just need to conduct an overall review (which we will be doing during this and next year),” Aleksandr Lukashenko stressed. Important economic and social facilities are also getting ready to repulse any kinds of attacks, he added.
The president said that several years ago he received a proposal to put military commissariats under the command of the local authorities. Then the head of state did not accept the proposal in order to preserve the well-functioning system. “The most important thing here is not just to align local military commissariats with the Defense Ministry, but also to ensure the management of the country, local authorities, heads of city halls and oblast executive committees. At the time I was afraid of making things worse with this reorganization. This issue, however, is still on the table, and we can keep on looking into it. If there are reasonable and convincing proposals on reorganization of the military system, we can consider them. The current system, however, has worked quite well so far,” the head of state explained.
