Crisis In Belarus

Over the past days, Belarus, an eastern European state bordering with Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, has become a scene of a new regime change attempt on the territory of the former USSR.

On August 9, the country held presidential elections and saw a dramatic increase of activity of opposition forces. The mobilized opposition and the wide-scale pro-opposition campaign in international and local media that took place exploited the existing issues in the economic and social sphere of the country as well as the general dissatisfaction of a part of the population with the corruption and fossilized elites, represented by acting President Alexander Lukashenko.

Despite this, preliminary results showed that Lukashenko received approximately 80% of votes, while the opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya received about 10% of the ballots. Over 4% of voters chose the “against all candidates” option. The election turnout was 84.23%.

The United States and the European Union already declared the elections in Belarus ‘unfair’ and ‘not independent’. As of August 11, the main Belarusian opposition candidate, Tikhanovskaya, and several top members of her campaign fled to Lithuania, from where they are making loud statements calling for what she calls ‘revolution’.

The pro-Western, neo-liberal part of the Russian opposition also held a rally in support of the coup attempt in Belarus in the front of the Belarusian embassy in Moscow.

Just a few weeks ago, Lukashenko was publicly flirting with Washington & Co and making anti-Russian statements. With the start of the election crisis, his new friends immediately betrayed him and in fact support the ongoing coup attempt. This once again demonstrated that arrangements with the Washington establishment and the European bureaucrats are not worth a row of beans.

The dividing line between constructive national forces and the coalition of various neo-liberal, pro-Western factions and radical nationalists financed by the West and trying to seize the power by any means once again became especially evident.

If the so-called ‘supporters of democracy’ achieve a victory, the area of instability currently localized in Ukraine will expand into Belarus and may ignite fires all over eastern Europe, including the European part of Russia.