Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 14 – Dmitry
Kiselyov, the flamboyant host of Russia-1’s News of the Week program, said
yesterday that if Belarus stops being friend with Moscow, then at some point it
will “simply disappear,” the kind of bombast that may mobilize Putin’s base in
Russia but that is guaranteed to drive Belarusians away from Russia as fast as
possible.
The Putin regime propagandist
declared that if Belarus refuses to cooperate with Russia on Russia’s terms,
“Russia may lose an ally. Of course, we categorically do not want this. But if
Minsk decides to exist without Russia, the future of Belarus will be ghastly” (by24.org/2019/01/13/the_russian_used_condom_threating_to_belarus/).
“Russia, of course, will be weakened
is that happens, but Belarus simply won’t exist. One must not have any
illusions about that,” Kiselyov said.
Kiselyov’s language is all too
typical of what other Kremlin loyalists are saying, and it is one of the
reasons why the Belarusian Popular Front is calling on Minsk to limit the
broadcast of Russian TV channels in Belarus (belaruspartisan.by/politic/451486/,
and znak.com/2019-01-13/v_belorussii_predlozhili_ogranichit_translyaciyu_rossiyskih_telekanalov).
Russian
reaction to the Belarusian Popular Front’s appeal was immediate: Aleksey
Pushkov of the Federation Council commission on information policy denounced
the Belarusian Peoples Front for trying to separate Belarus from Russia and
declared that Russian TV never features anti-Belarusian materials.
He
said that the Front’s call was part of a larger effort to push Belarus “onto
the Ukrainian path.” Others like Yury Zalog, a member of the Duma’s labor,
social policy and veterans affairs committee were equally dismissive and
equally condemning of the Belarusian Popular Front.
The
call to restrict Russian TV broadcasts in Belarus was made by the Front in a
declaration it adopted two days ago calling for 2019 to become “The Year of the
Belarusian Language” in the republic (news.tut.by/economics/622369.html).
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