BELARUSIAN ‘CUNNING FOX’ IS PLANNING TO RUN FOR A SEVENTH TERM AS PRESIDENT

Lukashenko has been leading the country for more than 30 years. In 1994, ‘Batka,’ as the Belarusians often call him, was a people’s deputy and director of a successful state farm. Then he won in the second round of the presidential election. Later, Lukashenko took part (and won) in all presidential races – in 2001, 2006, 2010, 2015 and 2020. As early as this summer, speaking at various events, he hinted that ‘the citizens of Belarus need to get used to the idea of a new president.’ But, as it seems, he changed his mind.

A quick paradigm shift is the trademark of Alexander Grigorievich. He can almost synchronously call Russians ‘morons’ for not wanting to order heavy tractors at the Minsk factory and order his athletes to raise the flag of suspended Russia at the Olympics. In 2020, Lukashenko ordered his security forces to harshly detain fighters of the Russian PMC Wagner, who were travelling through Minsk to Africa, and in 2022 he allowed Putin to introduce troops into Ukraine from his territory. Today, by the way, the ‘Wagnerites’ are quite calmly engaged in combat training of the Belarusian army in Belarus. In big politics it is called the art of sitting on two chairs at the same time. In the case of Lukashenko, we can talk about three or even four chairs at once.

Observers from the so-called ‘unfriendly’ countries, in particular from Germany and France, will be present at the upcoming presidential elections in Belarus. And representatives of the ruling parties will come from Hungary and Slovakia. Of course, there will also be Russians, since Belarus and Russia have been part of the Union State since 2000. In fact, this is a purely formal integration entity that allows Lukashenko to get all kinds of benefits from Moscow while preserving his own sovereignty. For example, when Polish-Belarusian relations worsened, ‘Batska’ insisted that Russian complexes with tactical nuclear weapons be introduced into his territory. Lukashenko then referred to the articles of the mutual defence treaty. However, last summer he announced out of the blue that he was withdrawing his troops from the Ukrainian-Belarusian border. Kiev immediately took advantage of this and sent the freed forces to the Kursk region of the Russian Federation. In this situation Minsk pretended that the mutual defence agreement did not exist, so it did not help the Russians to repel the Ukrainian attack. In fact, this illustrated his own words said in 2018 about the alliance with Russia: ‘Why do we need such an alliance if Russia sets new conditions every year!’.

However, in 2020, when mass opposition protests were held across Belarus, such anti-Kremlin rhetoric did not prevent Lukashenko from accepting Moscow’s help in the form of specialised police units. This approach is quite in line with another nickname of the president – Luka (from the word sly, cunning).

Before the escalation of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the West used to call Lukashenko ‘the last dictator of Europe’. But today he is more often called ‘the Cunning Fox of Belovezhskaya Pushcha’. There are enough reasons for this. For example, on the eve of the elections ‘Batska’ decided to change tactics once again and flirt with the European Union and the USA. He granted amnesty to several political prisoners (including one of the main organisers of the 2020 riots, Roman Protasevich), pardoned German citizen Rico Krieger, sentenced to death, and complimented the United States a couple of times, mentioning that President-elect Donald Trump is ‘a real leader, a real man’. At the same time, a wave of repressions against people who have a clear pro-Russian position and support Putin’s actions in Ukraine spread across Belarus. Public activists Elvira Mirsalimova, Nikolai Petrushenko, Vsevolod Shimov, Artyom Agafonov, Andrei Suzdaltsev and others were persecuted. By the way, the news about this caused a strong positive reaction in Kiev.

Now Lukashenko is focused on proving to the Belarusian voters his brutality and readiness to rule the republic indiscriminately for the next five years. Thus, recently he organised a flash-mob on chopping firewood. Carefully selected participants of the event took turns approaching thick firewood and tried to split it with an axe. Needless to say, Alexander Lukashenko won the competition of woodcutters.