Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 3 – Moscow can’t
afford the consequences of a direct military invasion of Belarus and doesn’t
have sufficient resources to be able to buy off Minsk, Aleksandr Vlantsevich
says; and consequently, it has already begun a hybrid war against its western
neighbor, seeking to destabilize the situation and remove Lukashenka from
power.
The Belaruskaya prauda
commentator says that Belarus now has many elements which recall those of
Ukraine in 2013 and of Romania in 1989. As a result, Lukashenka is ever less
able to retain power and stability because there are “too many domestic and
foreign factors” deployed against him (belprauda.org/gibridnaya-vojna-rf-protiv-belarusi-protsess-poshel/).
What the Kremlin is working toward,
Vlantsevich argues, is a combination of two things; and he stresses that both
are important to it. On the one hand, it wants to destabilize the situation and
thus force Lukashenka from office. And on the other, it plans to blame both on
the West and then use the resulting confusion and instability as the basis for intervention.
“Under conditions when economic or
information methods don’t work and direct military means are undesirable,” the
Minsk commentator says, “only one thing remains,” to destabilize things to the
point that Lukashenka can’t hold power and then use his ouster as the occasion
for the introduction of Russian peacekeepers.
In far too many ways, the situation with
regard to Belarus now recalls that of Kyiv in the summer and fall of 2013 in
Ukraine. Everything appeared calm, and no one anticipated what was coming. It
looked like Kyiv would sign the association agreement with the European Union,
and so few noticed that Russia had already begun its “’hybrid war’” against
Ukraine.
“How all this ended, we saw with our
own eyes,” Vlantsevich says. Moscow seems committed to repeating the same
approach now. Belarusians need to be aware of that danger because being
forewarned is to be forearmed at least in the tactical sense.
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