It is important to know that the 79.7% was given to Lukashenka by the head of the electoral committee, his long-time ally. There are poll results from electoral stations where the lead opposition candidate has 80% while other electoral stations just across the street show 80% for Lukashenka. There is a lot of variation in results, depending on whether electoral station members could be bullied to sign off rigged results or not.
Also, the world completely missed the wonderful election campaing by three beautiful women that took on the leadership after their men were jailed or ran away. They are calling themselves Love, Might, Win. The lead opposition candidate, the Might of the trio emerged as the nation leader literally in a matter of weeks. Her speeches are smiple, peaceful and straight to the point. She did not call people into streets. Still, 100,000 confronted the police tonight for her. Some died.
It's really hard to resolve this barbaric situation in a civilized way. Communication channels are blocked, people are actively oppressed, and the voting protocol is totally broken. At the same time, people of Belarus want to be independent, and aren't eager to call for external help.
Lukashenko announced many times that Belarus is an "IT-country". And now without Internet access (TCP/UDP are almost completely filtered on DPI, even SMS from abroad stopped working several hours ago) those words are just a bad joke to me :(
Nope. The story with "Russian mercenaries" is clearly aimed at creating a "besieged fortress" image to convince citizens that country needs a "strong leader" and stability. Before every election there is some kind of an external threat, which gets forgotten soon afterwards. Previously it was the West, now it's Russia.
Russia is less skillful at inducing and controlling street protests, so it usually sees it as an attempt by West to topple current government and install a more dependent one. And since none of the opposition candidates are visibly more pro-Russian than Lukashenko (which is a "known evil" for the Russian government), it makes scenario of Russia inducing those protests even less likely. I bet that in the following days Russia will accept the election results and will not condone suppression of protests too much,
During Covid-19, Belarus became a kind of international aviation hub. Those mercenaries were on there way to Middle East as part of the private armies Russia sends to places like Lybia. Even Russian government officials acknowledged that, althouth this makes them look bad internationally.
He claims this, but this is definitely not true. These people are Belarusians, Lukashenko abuses power for 26 years and kills innocent people throughout the history. Today on the voting day Belarusians have seen each other on voting stations, they have seen how many people voted against the dictator. Most of my friends are against, my family is against and there is no Russia behind us.
Sure. Belarussians can be spurred into action just like anybody else. A few provocations is all it takes.
> Most of my friends are against
No doubt. Shit I (and most of my friends) were "against" Putin in Russia. I always vote for whatever is the least embarrassing clown that he allows to run against himself. Note also that I think Putin is the best Russian leader in almost a hundred years - that's how low the bar has been before him. Be that as it may, I think he's corrupt as fuck, and I don't think he's the best Russia has to offer. _Most_ of the people in Russia, however, vote for him. Even if he didn't rig the elections, he'd win, just not with such an overwhelming margin.
I very strongly suspect the same is the case in Belarus - cities vote only mostly for Lukashenko, rural areas vote _overwhelmingly_ for Lukashenko, poor people vote as they're told by (government controlled) mass media.
Having 10-15% of people who don't like him doesn't matter a whole lot as long as he keeps control of the national security apparatus, and as long as Putin doesn't want him gone. If Putin wants him gone, though, shit could turn real ugly real quick, and you wouldn't even know why.
Don't get me wrong, I did not say it was "true". I merely said that this is what Lukashenko thinks. I also think it's somewhat plausible that Putin would use COVID19 crisis for geopolitical maneuvers.
> cities vote only mostly for Lukashenko, rural areas vote _overwhelmingly_ for Lukashenko
That's not true this time. It was like that before, now the candidate from opposition, Tihanouskaya, gained about 79% on at least 85 polling stations officially! The situation is different today, Lukashenko has 10-15% incl. army and police forces.
Voting committees were afraid to publish protocols in front of people yesterday night and were running and escorted by police away from polling stations in most cities in Belarus, no results were published on such stations. 33 cities had protests yesterday, there were no leaders, it was all decentralized, nobody expected so many hot spots and so many people. Today internal repression machinery was rerouted to regions, to "rural" regions, as you say.
Jailing of candidates happens every time there's an election in Belarus. Same as in Russia only total clowns are allowed to run against the anointed candidates. This is the first time Internet was cut off, IIRC.
Russia is not involved in mass protests in any way - I personally know some people who are now on the streets of Minks and they really angry at Lukashenko.
BTW, Belarus also completely disabled international data roaming for all visitors, even in Iran they didn't do that.
Russia wants to "teach" Lukashenko some lessons, but "Maidan" is a curse word for Putin, probably he is having nightmares because we can have the same situation in Russia in 2024.
People are downvoting, but it def looks like the truth. As a Russian I've been worried about this involvement since the mercenaries were detained.
The level of pressure Putin put on Lukashenko was unbelievable. The ruse was quite transparent: create the Union and put Putin on the throne. L. stood strong and made Putin opt for plan B (constitutional amendments which amounted to a coup).
The measures taken to force Lukashenko's hand were cutting off oil supply (heh, the United States did the same to Japan pre-WWII), stopping imports of Belarusian goods, setting up disadvantageous tax regimes. Ex-ambassador to Belarus Babich was openly insulting Lukashenko, Belarus and after being booted from Minsk was put in charge of anti-Belarusian economic warfare in the Ministry of Economy in Russia.
Gazprom-sponsored candidate (Babariko (sp?)) couldn't make it to the polls, so the decision was made to up the ante.
Let me be clear - I'm not alone - there are many thousands of Lukashenko admirers here in Russia, just yesterday saw a middle-aged man in a mall with a T-shirt and a slogan "he doesn't steal" next to "bat'ka"'s portrait. It would do Russia a lot of good to have Lukashenko in power instead of Putin. Lukashenko's COVID response didn't make much sense, though.
It's an uneasy relationship, largely by design. If Lukashenko gets too friendly with Russia, Russia will not cut Belarus the hydrocarbon deals that Belarus has been getting forever, which would plunge a lot of people there further into poverty and decimate the economy. There will also be pressure to form a union of some sort, which would mean Lukashenko would lose full control over billions of dollars he's pinching off of in Belarus today (IIRC he basically owns all of telecom in the country). So Lukashenko has to threaten the bear a bit so to speak, by also getting friendly with the West, or at least pretending that he's going to if negotiations do not succeed. He's playing both the West and Russia against each other. If he gets too friendly with the West, however, Russia will take Belarus. It cannot afford to not have buffer states around it or NATO bases within strike distance of its population centers, for obvious geopolitical reasons. Belarus is one of those buffer states.
So Russia could well be supporting the opposition (who I imagine will become closer to the EU if in power) so they then have a reason for Russia to take Belarus?
Russia will do whatever it needs to do to prevent Belarus from affiliating itself militarily or economically with the West. Whether it's being BFFs with Lukashenko, or "supporting opposition", or partitioning Belarus, or taking it whole - all of those options are on the table. Which one will be chosen will depend on the situation. Fundamentally Russia would like to have Belarus as a part of some union (cultural affinity is very strong between the two countries, and Belarussian and Russian people consider themselves to be ethnically very close; to a Russian eye Belarussian language looks like Russian with deliberate and funny grammatical mistakes), but if it can't, it's quite happy to have it as a buffer state. What it can't have are NATO bases in Belarus. Same as it can't have NATO bases in Ukraine or NATO bases in Crimea. If you'd like to understand why, just take a look at the map with population density overlaid.
Not since Lukashenka turned away the proposal to form a political union with Russia, which made Putin look like an idiot when rewriting the constiution just for the sake of staying in power.
Also, the world completely missed the wonderful election campaing by three beautiful women that took on the leadership after their men were jailed or ran away. They are calling themselves Love, Might, Win. The lead opposition candidate, the Might of the trio emerged as the nation leader literally in a matter of weeks. Her speeches are smiple, peaceful and straight to the point. She did not call people into streets. Still, 100,000 confronted the police tonight for her. Some died.