Unfortunately, the end of Lukashenko at this point would most likely mean the country getting gobbled up by Russia. His regime has been playing a balancing act between Europe and Russia for a long time, making symbolic gestures one way or the other depending on who happened to present the latest tasty trade deal or political concession. And for a while it worked - for example, Belarus managed to brand itself as neutral ground for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia over Donbas. Though lately, since the presidential election last August, which was rigged crudely and blatantly even by the standards of post-soviet dictatorships, the regime has been holding to power through increasingly brutal tactics, which naturally swing its alignment ever more unambiguously towards Russia. I’m sure the Kremlin has long had plans how to Crimea the whole country as soon as Lukashenko loses grip of actual power, and when pretty much all political opposition of Belarus is working in exile, it would be hard for anybody to stop those plans in time.
In fact, considering how obviously harmful this act has been to Belarus, and given that the KGB agents who staged the bomb scare apparently had Russian passports, it looks suspiciously like a Russian idea that Lukashenko hastily signed off on, to his own detriment.
This Ben Norton looks like yet another Greenwald-style Useful Idiot. He has yet to learn that one can critique or oppose capitalism and acknowledge wrongdoing by the U.S. without engaging in whataboutism and spreading disinformation on behalf of authoritarian and terrorist regimes.
This is totally unbelievable; a Ryanair Plane was told to land in Belarus and actually landed in Belarus; rather than touching down several hundred miles away?
Right, the US did that… unilaterally and without any help. It was a shitty thing to do and I have no doubt that the US was involved, but let’s not pretend those were US fighter jets.
Luckily Boing Boing, this BBS, the EU and I and other Happy Mutants are not the US government, which leads me to wonder why you imply their hypocrisy is somehow ours when you engage in whataboutism by asking where all the outrage was when the US did the same thing seven years ago. I’d list some of the numerous parade of threads on this forum about the hero Edward Snowden’s mistreatment, but I’m disinclined to participate in so obvious a derail.
