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Owen Matthews in the Spectator makes a very important point I hadn't heard before and which I'm sure is true.
"It was mass protests in Belarus’ capital Minsk in August 2020 after an election widely seen as stolen by Lukashenko that prompted Putin to decide that the West was irrevocably hostile to the Kremlin and was hell bent on fomenting regime change across the former Soviet Union – including in Russia itself.
"To Putin and his inner circle of ex-KGB colleagues – notably Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and Federal Security Service head Aleksandr Bortnikov – the Minsk protests were, like the Maidan revolution that brought down a pro-Moscow leader in Kyiv in 2014, entirely directed and produced by Washington. Lukashenko narrowly survived the 2020 revolt, aided by lots of Russian brute force and only after arresting tens of thousands of protestors who were systematically beaten, raped and tortured. But the chain of events that led Putin to invade Ukraine was directly triggered by fear that supposedly western-backed people-power protests that had so nearly toppled Lukashenko could be repeated in Moscow."
As they used to say in the American south: outside agitators.
ReplyDeletePeople in Minsk might have their own reasons for being very tired of Mr Lukashenko and his endless warming of the leadership seat in an economically stagnant country.
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