WARSAW, Poland — The United States failed to issue visas for Belarusian officials to attend the inaugural meeting of President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace,” despite inviting Belarus to join as a founding member, the country’s Foreign Ministry says.
In an angry statement, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry says it told the event’s organizers it would be represented by Foreign Minister Maxim Ryzhenkov at the meeting and had applied for the visas in advance.
“However, despite completing all the required procedures on our part, visas were not issued to our delegation,” the ministry says.
“This situation naturally raises the question: what kind of peace and what kind of consistency can we be talking about if even the basic formalities for our participation were not fulfilled by the organizers?”
The eastern European country, ruled for more than 30 years by President Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, was one of only around two dozen that accepted invitations to join Trump’s board.
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