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Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power in Belarus for 26 years and is often referred to as the last dictator of Europe, is alarmed by growing dissatisfaction and support for his potential rivals in the August 9 presidential elections by lighting his propaganda machine against a long-time ally and great rival. The New York Times writes.
Once acclaimed by large sections of the population for maintaining stability in Belarus and avoiding the unrest and mass unemployment that spread throughout much of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, Lukashenko recently received a wave of criticism at home. , particularly due to the mismanagement of the coronavir pandemic. Moscow is getting worse and Washington is getting better.
For many years, he manipulated east-west competition to stay in power. During a meeting with economic officials in Minsk on Friday, Lukashenko, a day after his potential rival in the elections, was arrested, the former head of the Russian capital bank Viktor Babarika said he had blocked a conspiracy to incite a revolution.
Although he did not point the finger directly at the Kremlin, Lukashenko said that “the masks have been cut not only from the puppets we have here, but also from their rulers outside Belarus.” But no one had the slightest doubt that he was talking about Russia.
For two decades, Babarika ran Belgazprombank, a Belarusian bank owned by the Russian gas giant Gazprom. He and his son, who spearheaded the father’s election campaign, were arrested last Thursday on suspicion of financial crime.
Despite repeatedly denigrating Belarusian speakers instead of Russian and grain behind Belarusian nationalist bars, Lukashenko has said he will not allow anyone to threaten the country’s sovereignty.
“There is no greater value than a sovereign and independent Belarus,” he said.
Many protesters, many of whom were arrested by the security forces, took to the streets of Minsk and other cities to protest against the arrests of Babarika and her son. Babarik has become an easy target for his long-standing ties to Gazprom, which the Kremlin has been using as a geopolitical tool for many years.
Another potential candidate, popular video blogger and former businessman Sergei Tikhanovsky, was also arrested and charged with ties to Russia through an oligarch linked to the Kremlin.
Investigators say he found a hidden nearly a million dollars hidden in his home under the sofa, believing they believe the money came from Russia.
Artiom Straibman, founder of the Minsk-based consulting and research group Sense-Analytics, says Lukashenko has always tried to discredit his political rivals by portraying them as puppets allegedly run by foreign states.
But he called them Western conspiracy officers.
“Times have changed,” he says. “Now they seek to take advantage of anti-Russian sentiment in the West.”
According to Shraibman, Belarusian diplomats began telling their European counterparts that they would view the arrest of Lukashenko’s political opponents not as an attack on the democratic process, but as a necessary response to Russian interference. But hardly anyone believes such arguments.
The European Union protested Babarika’s arrest and demanded his immediate release.
The United States did not comment on the arrest of the former banker, but the US embassy in Minsk circulated a statement calling on the Belarusian government to “fulfill its international obligations to respect fundamental rights” and to release the detained protesters. .
In Belarus, elections that would have been declared free and fair by independent observers have not been held since 1994. Lukashenko won five consecutive presidential elections, often followed by repression.
In the past, such repression took place after the elections, when defeated opposition candidates took to the streets to protest against non-transparent elections and other irregularities. However, this time the crackdown took place before, just before the election, which may be a sign that Lukashenko fears the election results this time, The New York Times reports.
Independent public opinion polls in Belarus are severely restricted, and the results of government-affiliated public opinion polling agencies are generally kept secret.
However, a survey by sociologists at the Belarus Academy of Sciences in April showed that Lukashenko trusted only a third of the country’s population, a very low rating for a leader who controls all television and other traditional media.
Lukashenko’s latest transfer from Moscow became particularly visible when United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Minsk in February.
Following this visit (which was the first visit by the US Secretary of State to Belarus since the early 1990s), Washington appointed the first ambassador to Minsk in more than a decade, a sign that it wants to normalize relations.
The fall in oil prices caused by the pandemic also led Lukashenko to move away from Russia. In the past, Belarus has at least 10 percent (some say 20%) generated its GDP cheaply by buying oil from Russia, which it sold to Europe after refining. However, this game changed this year when Russia began to demand market prices for its oil and the prices of refined petroleum products fell.
According to Shraibman, Belarus is chained by long-term natural gas contracts with Gazprom, forcing it to pay a price much higher than the current market price.
Encouraged by Russia’s energy prices and encouraged by improved relations with Washington, Lukashenko increasingly opposes pressure from Russian President Vladimir Putin to unite Belarus and Russia into a so-called union state. This project was born in the 1990s, but then stopped.
Lukashenko now seems convinced that he can silence Western criticism of pre-election crackdown by presenting it as a necessary response to Russian interference.
Lukashenko’s close ally Ivan Tertel, who heads the anti-corruption agency that accused Babarika, warned Moscow this week that an investigation into the former banker would expose Russia’s “puppets” in connection with his election campaign.
“Those people, as we know, are high-ranking executives of Gazprom, and perhaps even more,” he said, referring to the potential role of the Kremlin.
Belarusian Marina Rachlei, an expert at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, says “there is no evidence” to support the allegations of interference by Gazprom or the Russian state.
She says Lukashenko’s problems are largely due to voters being weary of his long tenure in power and his poor response to the spread of the coronavirus.
Although the volume of coronavirus research in Belarus is small, more than 58,000 cases have already been registered in the country. infection cases For comparison, in Poland, which has a population four times larger, about 32 thousand. cases.
‘A. Lukashenko risks losing control of the situation, says Rachlei. “You basically cannot silence the protests, because they mostly take place on social media and spread like wildfires.”
Young people in Belarus have long criticized Mr. Lukashenko, who is greatly supported by older citizens, especially those who live in rural areas and who remember the Soviet Union with nostalgia. However, the presidential election campaign showed that dissatisfaction included not only young people but also the Belarusian system.
Babarika’s decision to run for president shocked Lukashenko, who had previously considered him a credible member of the business elite. Former Belarusian ambassador to the United States, Valery Cepkala, also briefed Lukashenko on his plans to participate in and challenge the election.
Before his arrest last Thursday, V. Babarika raised 425,000. signatures of the population that supports it, which is a large number in a country with less than 10 million inhabitants. persons.
Just before his arrest, Babarika gave an interview to Gazprom-controlled Russian liberal radio station Echo Moskvy, and mocked accusations that Moscow backed him and was pursuing Russian interests.
He noted that he had previously been criticized in Russia for “using Gazprom’s money to develop the Belarusian nationalist movement”, given his decision to finance a translation of Svetlana Alexeyevich’s works from Russian to Belarusian. The latter received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 and is extremely critical of the Putin government in Russia.
“The Russians have always said that I am a Belarusian nationalist. And the Belarusians called me pro-Russian because I worked for Gazprom, Babarika said.” The West doesn’t know what to think. “
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