Paul Goble
Staunton, May 31 – In an interview with Radio Svoboda’s Belarusian Service, Belarusian Nobelist Svetlana Alexiyevich, who now lives in Berlin, said she was not surprised by Putin’s actions in Ukraine but she was shocked by the behavior of the Russians: “It is impossible to explain the cruelty of Russians” there.
“No one expected” Russia to invade Ukraine, the historian says. “We were raised on Soviet idealism and believed that World War II was the last major war” in Europe. But Putin has dashed those hopes and expectations, and what is worse the Russian people have not yet shown any shame about this (svaboda.org/a/32436497.html).
Alexiyevich has won international recognition and respect for her books about the reaction of Soviet, Russian, Belarusian and others to World War II and the Chechen war; and so her conclusions about Russian are especially well founded and damning as far as the Russians of today are concerned.
In other comments, Alexiyevich said that she believes that as many as 60 percent of Belarusians who have fled abroad want to return home once Lukashenka is gone and that she “fell in love” with her nation in 2020 when the people on their own rose in defense of their rights. It was the people rather than those labelled as leaders who were in fact in the lead.
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