The secretary of the National Security and Defence Council, Oleksiy Danilov, has said that preparations for war in Ukraine began in advance. He said this in an interview with the Liga newspaper.

"Everything that the Americans said about the war was not a surprise for us. We began to prepare for the war in advance. We realized that we had to remove the influence of the Russian Federation as much as possible. Imagine if before February 24 all these media gauleiter screaming from propaganda channels were on our television. Imagine that Medvedchuk is not sitting at home with a bracelet on his leg, but continues to work with his agents. Imagine not paying attention to our cyber defenses and communications. And on February 25 no one has television, radio broadcasting, you can't make a phone call... We have been preparing for a year and a half so that all communications were protected. This is the number one issue during the war," he said.

According to Danilov, it was impossible to report the impending war in advance.

"We had to come out in November and say: we're going to have a war, the Russian Federation will create concentration camps here? Can you imagine the level of panic that could have gone up? But we gave a clear answer so that our country would be ready for war," he added.

At the same time, according to the secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine, the Ukrainian leadership "really wanted the Belarusians not to betray us and not to have Russian troops coming from their territory," but this did not happen.

"On February 22 Reznikov communicated with the Belarusian defense minister, who assured: don't even think about it, we just have exercises. On February 23 our main border guard General Deineko communicated with the main border guard of Belarus, who said: Sergey Vasilievich, don't even think about it. A week later we had an exercise on the border, the Belarusans sent an observer. It was unpleasant for us when troops came from the side of Belarus," said Danilov.

We shall remind you that Bloomberg agency earlier published a piece with a statement made by US President Joe Biden. He said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had allegedly paid no attention to the warning that Russia would invade Ukraine in February.