Version imprimableOn 27 August in a TV interview, Vladimir Putin said he is ready to send Russian police units to Belarus in case of a direct threat to legitimate authorities in this country. In his interview Putin also made it clear that he considers Lukashenko to be a legal president, and that the actions of the Belarusian riot police after the August 9 elections were " moderate". Calling Lukashenko to the dialog with the society, he definitely accepted the version of the dialog that Lukashenko himself insists on: the beginning of the process of some changes in the Belarusian Constitution after the unconditional recognition of the election results - which strongly recalls those “changes” that the Russian society got as a result of a farce of voting on the constitutional amendments in July.
Putin’s statements clearly demonstrate the tacit agreement reached between authoritarian regimes: Russia helps Lukashenko to retain power in exchange for strengthening its political influence in Belarus. For his part, in recent days Lukashenko has voiced a version of events that fully corresponds to the Kremlin’s picture of the world - protesters are financed and backed by the West, and their actions take place under the well-established scenario of "color revolutions". This is how mass demonstrations and workers’ strikes in Belarus are trying to pack into the usual framework of the geopolitical battle between Russia and the West (despite the fact that opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya keeps repeating that the protests in Belarus are “neither European nor anti-Russian”). In this situation, Putin’s police operation to suppress protests in a neighboring country could easily become a reality.
We believe that such an operation will not only be a shameful fact of imperialist intervention, but will also increased repressions against any political opposition within Russia itself.
28 August 2020
