Vintsuk Vyachorka: New generation of Belarusians don’t want to be part of “Russian world”

The number of opponents of Belarus’ integration with Russia has reached an all-time peak.

Vintsuk Vyachorka, a politician, in his interview to Radio Racyja, named several reasons for that.

- It is noted that the number of people opposing the integration with Russia has reached an all-time peak over the period of many years when monitoring held by sociologists. What is the reason for that?

- First of all, these opinion surveys’ results could be treated in different ways, but I think that in fact Belarusians have been greatly affected by the Ukrainian tragedy, the attack of Putin’s Russia on Ukraine, and the attempt to destroy the Ukrainian statehood after Ukrainians started to make the European choice, and flee the Russian geopolitical space – informational, economic, mental one. It is an extremely vivid evidence that mean actions could be expected from the eastern neighbour. And I believe that despite the consistent Russification, which scope could be compared to the Russification in Tsarist or Soviet times (and which is worse in some aspects than the Soviet one), carried out by the Belarusian authorities, the process of awakening of the national awareness has broken through the asphalt. A new generation has emerged, and it wants to have its identity in the world and in Europe. They do not want to be a usual part of the “Russian world”, but are trying to belong to the European Belarusian nation. All these things taken together create the air and the force field of sentiments in Belarus.

- And what about the influence of the Russian propaganda, which is disorientating Belarusians’ minds?

- I think that in today’s Belarus there is a considerable part of people who simply do not watch the TV at all. The authorities of Belarus would not dare to switch off the aggressive propagandistic channels and to stop broadcasting of Russian TV serials. People who are free from TV injections, use their own sources. And so they form their own values. It is extremely important, to treat the nation for Russian TV. Not to be engaged in empty rhetoric: “there should be choice”, but to view the Russian informational space as the tool of the informational war.

- Is it possible that the Belarusians, who do not want the integration with Moscow any more, have been influenced by the economic factor, as everyone sees that Russia is involving Belarus in its crisis?

- To my mind, the thinking population has been influenced by the situation in the end of the year, when savings could have disappeared, and people found themselves on the edge of a financial black hole again. Everyone recalled 2011, and the assurances of the government that nothing was going to happen. Everyone realized: by linking the Belarusian economy and the national currency to the weak horse, it is naïve to expect that after the horse drowned, the one roped to it by force wouldn’t drown as well.