Alexander Lukashenko, Belarusian, and English

Factual Questions
1

Alexander Lukashenko is the president of Belarus, though his contempt for the Belarusian language is legendary. Almost immediately after taking office in 1994, he reportedly condemned Belarusian as a “poor language” and elevated the Russian language to co-official status. According to Radio Free Europe, he once claimed that English and Russian were the only two “great languages”.

In light of these comments, I’ve got a couple questions:
[ol]
[li]What is Lukashenko’s mother tongue, Russian or Belarusian? (The article I linked to above shows that he can speak Belarusian, at least when given time to rehearse.)[/li][li]For all the praise Lukashenko has heaped upon the English language, can he actually speak it? Whenever he’s given interviews to English-speaking journalists he’s spoken Russian, though that’s not conclusive proof of anything. Putin also tends to stick to Russian with the press, though he does understand and speak some English, as numerous YouTube clips attest. Are there any similar videos showing Lukashenko speaking English?[/li][/ol]

2

I’d assume he’s a native Russian speaker. Most Belarussians are.

3

Belorussian is mutually intelligible with Russian. Up until five minutes ago I actually thought it was just a dialect of Russian. Now I’ve learned that linguists debate whether its a dialect or an independent language, with most considering it an independent language.

Apparently only about 12% of Belorussians speak Belorussian natively.

4

Of course, the line between what is a language and what is a dialect is always a fuzzy one, and in situations like this the question is going to be just as much about politics as about linguistic.