I’m away this week with almost no internet so just a quick comment. This morning Putin has publicly endorsed Lukashenko and stated that Belarus election was free and fair. This comes on top of his recent statement that Russia has formed a strategic reserve in case situation in 1/
Belarus gets out of Luka’s control. Predictably, Russia placed its bet on weak and compliant Lukashenko. Yesterday Luka said that Belarus won’t wait for the West to impose sanctions, it’s going to impose its own anti-EU sanctions first. Belarus will stop illegally reexporting 2/
Russia-banned EU products to Russia and will no longer export its petrochemicals and potash through Lithuanian and Latvian ports and will use Russian Ust-Luga port instead. Even though Luka pretends it’s his own initiative, that’s precisely what Kremlin has been demanding from 3/
Belarus in the last couple of years. The implementation of these threats will cost Belarus billions of dollars but it’s not a problem since Russia is ready to forgive its debt to Belarus. Meanwhile Belarusian authorities have decided to fully ban all the independent and 4/
foreign media (apart from RT and Sputnik). State TV journalists have been replaced by Russians who are trying their best to start a civil war. Civil society is also under fire, independent shops, cultural centres etc are closed, their owners under arrest or fled the country. 5/
The number of political prisoners has skyrocketed. Private business and esp the IT sector are next to be destroyed. In short, Belarus is turning into another Donbas – a lawless police state with no economy apart from Russia’s subsidies. What Russia wants in return for its 6/
support is easy to imagine. Russia supports Luka’s idea of a constitutional referendum but it becomes very clear it won’t be Luka asking questions but Russia. Perhaps, with the same outcome as the 2014 referendum in Crimea. 7/7
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