Ukrainian commander Biletsky: Belarusians are the same as Ukrainians, but they lack a moral tradition of armed struggle for independence
Andriy Biletsky, one of the most famous Ukrainian commanders, founder of the "Azov" regiment, and currently commander of the Third Army Corps of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, compared Belarusians and Ukrainians and explained what he sees as the main difference between the two peoples.

“How do Ukrainians differ from Belarusians? It seems to me that culturally, anthropologically — not much at all. The issue is that Belarusians do not have a serious tradition, a moral tradition of armed struggle for their country's independence. But Ukrainians have and have had this tradition,” noted Andriy Biletsky in a video on the Ukrainian YouTube channel "Bombardyr".
According to Biletsky, the tradition of armed struggle does not arise by itself and is not an abstraction. Behind it stand specific people and their deeds. As examples of such continuity in Ukrainian history, he named the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic, the Ukrainian Galician Army, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and the Ukrainian Military Organization.
Separately, Biletsky dwelled on the figure of the first leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Yevhen Konovalets, whose remains were transported to Ukraine and reburied in Kyiv this August.
According to Biletsky, Konovalets was not the sole creator of the Ukrainian tradition of armed struggle, but rather became the embodiment of the "deeds, dreams, will, sweat, and blood" of many people.
“These people gave us the tradition of statehood and the tradition of armed struggle. This is how we differ from Belarusians. Therefore, Belarus is currently a Gauleiter administration of the Russian Federation, while Ukraine is a struggling state, with occupied territories, but an independent state,” Andriy Biletsky believes.
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