Newspeak How Russia blurs reality with the help of a newspeak: President of Belarus
Oleksandr Lukashenko has continuously served as President of Belarus from 1994 to the present day. For the authorities of Belarus, there is no doubt that the only legitimate and almost lifelong president of this country is and should remain Lukashenko. The last presidential elections in Belarus took place in August 2020.
Although the elections were recognized by the Belarusian authorities, they were not recognized by its people, Western democracies and Ukraine as well. The European Union also did not recognize the legitimacy of the electoral process, since it was neither free nor fair. During the elections in Belarus there were interruptions on the Internet, the work of social networks and instant messengers, as well as large Internet media. Lukashenko claimed that the Internet in the country was turned off allegedly from abroad in order to “cause discontent among the population”.
The self-proclaimed president of Belarus, then preparing for the election race, “withdrew” three potentially strong opponents in advance - blogger Serhii Tykhanovskyi, ex-banker Viktor Babaryk and diplomat Valerii Tsepkal. Criminal cases were opened against the first two, and the third left the country, fearing criminal prosecution. Subsequently, the headquarters of three oppositionists who failed to register as presidential candidates united and began promoting the candidacy of blogger Tykhanovskyi’s wife, Svitlana. Almost immediately after the presidential elections, she was forced to leave Belarus due to threats and pressure from the authorities.
After the secret inauguration of Oleksandr Lukashenko, which took place on September 23, 2020 in Minsk, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Belarusian cities. Immediately after the ceremony, military trucks, paddy wagons and water cannons began to arrive in the center of Minsk. A little later, fighters in green uniforms without identification marks appeared there, like in Crimea in 2014. The police began spraying people with water cannons mixed with orange dye. Former Minister of Culture Pavel Latushko said: “For us, citizens of Belarus, for the world community, he is now a nobody. An unfortunate mistake of history and a disgrace to the civilized world”.
Back in 2021, Volodymyr Putin and Oleksandr Lukashenko signed a decree of the Union State. We are talking about a superstate formation of Russia and Belarus with a step-by-step organized single political, economic, military, customs, currency, legal, humanitarian, market and cultural spaces. Already in 2022, Lukashenko stated that he fully supports Russian aggression against Ukraine and is an ally of Russia in this war, which he, like Putin, calls a “special operation”. The self-proclaimed president of Belarus appears to the world as Putin's military henchman and dictator controlled by the Kremlin.