Nobody Needs Lukashenka :: Charter'97 :: News

A summary of war operations. This association is evoked by today’s flood of information on aggravation of Russian-Belarusian relations, coming since early morning. Urgent news were full of citations of Lukashenka’s morning speech about “Russian brothers who have betrayed us” and with whom he “putrefied in one war trench”. It seems that the whole state machine woke up and is trying to disprove in haste a long-standing myth that “we have only friends and well-wishers everywhere in the East”.

But Russian friends and well-wishers had certain objectives when they helped Alyaksandar Lukashenka, a former collective farm head, to come to power, and they have been supporting him for a long time. However, a few years have passed, and the hopes that their protégé would carry into effect every caprice, have faded away. First, in the middle of the 90-ieths, he had barefaced ambitions to occupy the Russian throne. The epic of earning millions and millions of dollars on integration field continues. The participation in Belarusian business promised to Russian capitalists in reality turned into the situation when only semi-criminal structures under protection of Belarusian authorities can work in the country. All this made recent patrons reconsider their views on their Belarusian protégé.

The Belarusian example clearly shows that for Russia it is more beneficial to cooperate with a sane leadership of the state and to establish business relations based on normal market rules, than to be a hostage of a deceiver and con artist of Lukashenk’s type. And very soon, when a former collective farmer would seriously think of the third term of his presidency, he should not count on a support of Russia he got accustomed to. Lukashenka will have to straighten out the problems with his opponents and the people of Belarus by himself. And this combat would not be an easy one for him.