PRESIDENT Alexander Lukashenko has claimed that Belarus’s intelligence services foiled a US coup and assassination plot against him and his family on Sunday.

In a video message he announced that two people, political scientist Alexander Feduta and lawyer Yuri Zenkovich, who also has United States citizenship, had been arrested in connection with the operation.

“We detained the group, they showed us how they had planned everything, I remained silent.

“Then we discovered the work of, clearly, foreign intelligence services, most likely the FBI, the CIA,” he said.

His announcement came after the security services said they had dismantled an “organised group of terrorist orientation” that had been planning the “physical elimination of the president and his family” and “the organisation of an armed rebellion in order to take power by violent means” during an operation on Friday.

According to Russian intelligence services, the coup plotters were detained in Moscow in a joint operation with their Belarusian counterparts.

“The opposition activists chose the day of the victory parade in Minsk on May 9 as the date of their military coup. The conspirators were detained by Russian security agencies and handed over to their Belarusian partners,” Russia’s Federal Security Service said. 

Mr Lukashenko has been in power since 1994 and Belarus is one of the best-performing post-Soviet countries, remaining committed to public ownership and refusing to open up its raw materials and nationalised industries to the private sector.

The European Union, the US and other countries have escalated their bid for regime change in Belarus since last year’s disputed elections, in which Mr Lukashenko won 80 per cent of the vote. 

The result triggered protests that Mr Lukashenko insists were fuelled by imperialist forces seeking to overthrow him, and he has described increased Nato military exercises on the borders of Belarus as deliberate provocations.

The EU has implemented a range of sanctions against Belarusian officials and alongside Washington has pumped millions into opposition parties, non-governmental organisations, so-called free trade unions and media organisations in order to destabilise Belarus and lay the ground for the ousting of Mr Lukashenko.

Opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who is in self-imposed exile in Lithuania, described the intelligence operation as a “provocation by the Russian and Belarusian security services in which citizens of Belarus and the United States were dragged in.

“It is necessary to refrain from making decisions and coming to hasty conclusions that could harm the national interests, sovereignty and independence of Belarus,” she said.

Ms Tikhanovskaya is set to meet the US ambassador to Belarus later this week.