Moscow worried about foreign interference in Belarus crisis: Russian FM

Moscow is worried about attempts to use the internal difficulties that Belarus and its leadership are facing to impose on its citizens procedures that external players consider beneficial for themselves, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said, reported Xinhua.

"Nobody hides that it is all about geopolitics, about the struggle for the post-Soviet space," Lavrov said in an interview with television channel Russia 1 on Wednesday.

"We saw this struggle in the previous stages of the development of the situation after the Soviet Union ceased to exist," he said.

Belarus is engulfed in mass protests after incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko won a sixth term during the Aug. 9 elections, with the opposition refusing to recognize the results.

Lavrov said he hopes that Belarusians will be able to sort out their own affairs themselves and not be led by "those who need this country solely in order to master the geopolitical space in order to promote the well-known destructive logic: You are either with Russia or with Europe."

"I see no lack of readiness on the part of the authorities for dialogue. I hope that the same readiness will be shown by those who, for one reason or another, are not satisfied with the election results," Lavrov said.