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If Belarus was already in the midst of a public health crisis, its president seems hell-bent on turning COVID-19 into a catastrophe for the country.
Defying the advice of the World Health Organization, Belarus went ahead with its military parade on Saturday to commemorate the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, despite the coronavirus pandemic.
Thousands of soldiers marched through posts full of onlookers. Children and military veterans sat side by side in the Minsk sun with very little care for social estrangement and only a few wearing masks.
The World War II parade continued in Belarus, with military bands.
Dressed in military attire and shaking hands with everything he knew, President Alexander Lukashenko told the crowd that he had no choice but to hold the parade.
“There will be people who will condemn us,” he said.
“Don’t be too quick to jump to conclusions, let alone condemn us, the heirs to victory, the Belarusians. We simply couldn’t act differently.”
Most of the other nations have acted very differently.
Belarus’ great neighbor to the east, Russia, celebrated a silent version of the 75th anniversary commemoration that President Vladimir Putin hoped to make a key element of his twentieth year in power.
He put a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and promised the nation that the parade would take place at a later date, though he gave no indication of when it might be possible.
Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko said he had no choice but to hold the parade.
“We are united by common memory and common hopes, our shared aspirations, our responsibility for the present and the future,” he said.
“We firmly believe that we are invincible when we are together.”
From Russia COVID-19 The number of cases approached the 200,000 milestone on Saturday, an especially grim marker on a grim occasion that commemorates the huge number of Soviet deaths in World War II.
Even that figure may be an understatement.
An overpass in Minsk was part of the celebrations.
In an unusually frank admission by a Russian politician, Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow and head of the country’s COVID-19 task force, said earlier this week that he thought the numbers in Moscow were close to 300,000.
Belarus has a much lower workload, just over 21,000, but it is higher than its Eastern European neighbors and is rapidly expanding.
President Lukashenko has made challenging the COVID-19 convention a point of principle, by refusing to put the country under lockdown and actively encouraging the public to participate in community events.
Sports activities have continued, and the President appears proud to dismiss the threat posed by COVID-19, calling other countries’ response “psychosis” and suggesting that vodka or saunas are effective countermeasures.
The image that emerges from the country’s hospitals is that of a health system under great pressure.
Health care facilities in Belarus have had to rely on charities for PPE. Pic: BYCOVID19
Volunteers from an organization called ByCovid19 have been supplying healthcare workers across the country with equipment that the government is unable to provide.
In just over a month, they have received more than 2,000 requests from almost every health center in the country. Volunteers say morale among doctors is worryingly low.
“You can’t say that state authorities do nothing. They do it,” said Andrei Tkachev, who is coordinating ByCovid’s response19.
“Unfortunately, the state is riddled with bureaucracy and is very slow in its actions.
“The salaries of ordinary doctors are very small, they cannot be compared with those of doctors in civilized countries.
“Unfortunately, they are quite depressed and many of them are thinking of giving up.
“Because they risk their lives without protection and charging pennies for it, many doctors refuse to work.”
A priest blesses a new grave where a Belarusian victim of COVID-19 has recently been buried. Pic: Irina Alekhovskaya / Belsat
The official death toll on COVID-19 in Belarus is low at 126.
Also in Russia, the proportion of deaths per case is unusually low (198,676 cases per 1,827 deaths), raising the question of whether the number of victims in any of the countries faces scrutiny.
Both are former Soviet bureaucracies where ugly truths tend to be suppressed.
However, President Putin’s approach has been cautious, as the Moscow lockdown regime will continue until at least the end of May and with tight controls through other Russian regions as well.
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President Lukashenko, by contrast, has taken a more arrogant approach to the health threat COVID-19 presents to his people.
He tried to keep the economy afloat by refusing to implement any kind of self-isolation regime before the August 9 presidential election.
Although he has been in power since 1994 and there are very few expectations that he will not continue to do so until August, holding this military parade is an open invitation to the spread of the virus. You can chase him again.
