If his time in the senate taught him anything, it’s probably that you have to work with the coalition you have and actually work to find as much common ground as you can, but also make sure you deliver fro each of those constituencies. No one gets everything, but we all get something, and that helps us to stick together.
https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1627970502173028353
Shoigu is strangling Wagner by doing the one thing he’s good at: bureaucratic ratfucking.
If anything, Lukashenko has been one of the most successful fence sitters around. His whole attitude is to Hell with Belarus, as long as he is head honcho. And without Putin covering his arse after he so blatantly faked an election, he would have been long gone by now.
Lukashenko is just playing the game “lets you and him fight” because he knew all along that Putin was going to make Belarus a vassal state at best. So he lets the Russians waste all of their military in Ukraine. He’s a garbage person, but he’s also a wily garbage person.
The joke is that he’d still be straddling the fence even if it fell over on its side.
Still, if Putin forces Belarus back into the Russian empire that’s basically it for Lukashenko. He’s not cut out to be a powerless satrap.
Oh, I agree 100%. And a big part of why Luka has been dicking around with his own army, pretending to mass on the border and then leave the Russians out to dry. He’s working the clock, hoping the Russians get ground down so badly they aren’t in the mood to face the newly mobilized Belarusian army that Luka is pretending will go to the Ukrainian frontier, but everyone can see is to do a Brian Boru* on the Russian Army if Luka thinks it’s necessary.
*A famous Irish high king who had the Vikings murdered in their beds, and is celebrated for it.
How would Luka stay in power without Russian support?
In the end, he’s an old-style Soviet dictator who has the army and secret police pretty wrapped up and who’s clamped down hard enough on political opponents to make them not matter. No-one except Russia would have any interest in invading Belarus, so there’s no real external threat either. As long as he doesn’t go full Ceaucescu he’ll be fine even without Putin.
You know the old joke about jumping out of a window might mean splatting on the pavement in a minute, but at least that’s a minute you have to figure out the next step that you didn’t have before?
That’s Luka. Running out of options, but somehow still in the game.
That’s probably Lukashenko’s gamble, but it won’t be easy. He has suppressed public displays of dissent, but the public sentiment is very clearly still against him. And there are a lot of Belarusian volunteers fighting for Ukraine - reportedly about 1500 in the Kastus Kalinouski Regiment whose motto is “First Ukraine, then Belarus”, and at least several hundred more in the International Legion and other units of the Ukrainian armed forces. If they get to go home from Ukraine victorious, with NATO-style training and equipment plus real combat experience and public support, Lukashenko might find that his army and police don’t matter a whole lot.
It would be great if, in addition to adding new member states to NATO, Putin’s stupid invasion ended up helping to topple this thug.
Apparently, he’s a genuine people person.
