Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko has denied that he initially knew about North Korea’s troop deployment to Russia, nine months after dismissing reports of the DPRK’s role in the Ukraine war as “rubbish” and accusing the West and Kyiv of “seizing on” the issue to get NATO to fight against Moscow.

Speaking to a TIME journalist, the Belarusian strongman contradicted his earlier claims about the absence of DPRK troops at the frontlines last October, when media and intelligence reports pointed to Pyongyang’s dispatch of thousands of soldiers to fight in the Kursk region.

“They couldn’t have participated and they