Tag: Alexander Lukashenko

Staunton, October 9 – Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s turn to the West, reflected by his expressed refusal to accept a Russian airbase on his territory and reports that the EU will be lifting some sanctions against him, has infuriated Moscow and prompted the Russian authorities to make plans to overthrow him, according to Yury Tsarik. Tsarik, a […]

Staunton, April 9 — In what appears to be a response to Alexander Lukashenko’s recent declaration that Belarus will never become the northwestern part of the Russian Federation, a Moscow journalist says Belarusians must vote this year to become just that or face “the liquidation” of their country and “the fate of Ukraine.” In the […]

Staunton, April 3 — Despite Alexander Lukashenko’s tilt away from Moscow and even his own use of his country’s national language on occasion, the situation of the Belarusian language is dire and is likely going to deteriorate further because of the failure of Minsk to live up to its own laws, according to the Frantsishak […]

Staunton, March 16 — A Russian nationalist with a long track record of hatred toward Belarus says that, on the basis of the logic Moscow has used to annex Crimea, Moscow should take back the portions now within the borders of the Belarusian Republic that were once part of the RSFSR. Not only does his […]

Staunton, March 5 – The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, to suggest that old rules and old expectations no longer apply and thereby increase uncertainty and fear. That explains why someone like Kseniya Sobchak has suggested that she is next on Putin’s list now that the Kremlin has killed Boris Nemtsov and why an […]

Staunton, February 16 – By his bombast and aggression, Vladimir Putin has destroyed “what was even a year ago called the post-Soviet space, an area which even then existed largely by inertia as an appendage of Russian ambitions” rather than as an expression of the desires of the countries included within that designation, according to […]

Staunton, February 4 – Many in the West fear that providing military assistance to Ukraine would open the way for disasters ranging from the potential loss of an American helicopter as happened in Somalia to a possible nuclear exchange between Russia and the West as Vladimir Putin has threatened. But such arguments, as emotionally compelling […]

Staunton, January 7 – Despite Vladimir Putin’s very public invocation of religion and his tight embrace of Patriarch Kirill, the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church has fallen over the last year, the result of government policies which could be called “covert secularization” and the spread of the notion of “Orthodox atheism,” according to Boris […]

Staunton, December 22 – Vladimir Putin has agreed with proposals by Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu to require the heads of the federal subjects to bear responsibility for mobilization and fighting against diversionary forces, a step that makes them into something like tsarist-era governors general and could presage a new territorial delimitation of the country. At […]

Staunton, December 22 — Belarusian nationalists over the last year “not only have come out of ‘the political ghetto’ into which they have been since the end of the 1990s but also have become an influential political force” in Minsk, indeed a force that even Alyaksandr Lukashenka has had to take into consideration and play […]