Andrey Piontkovsky: 1st Belorussian Front’s military operation for Lukashenka’s fratricidal liquidation starts

For 20 years Lukashenka kept stringing Moscow along, playing upon its imperial complexes.

It was written by Andrey Piontkovsky, a Russian political analyst, at the website of the Russian service of Radio Liberty:

- Relations between Mr Lukashenka and Mr Putin got off on the wrong foot from the very beginning, from the times of their first meeting at the CIS summit in late 1999. Mr Putin (Russia’s Prime Minister then) reminded Belarus’ President about hundreds of million dollars of outstanding gas bills in a polite and cool manner (the manner he had been taught in the KGB school to communicate with investigated persons).

Looking down upon Putin, as he is a tall man, the Great Slave started to shout in response that he is defending the Western borders of our “Holy Alliance” from invasion of hordes of the NATO, and this titanic contribution in the common security costs billions of contemptible US dollars, and that haggling is somewhat out of place there. Mr Putin was talked to in this manner one quite a long time ago, and he really disliked it.

The Great Slave had a bad feeling as well. The situation was so nice in the times of the old man! He visited Moscow once a year, signed another insignificant paper about even deeper, and final reunification with Russia, broke a glass for vodka in the Palace of the Facets (in the Moscow Kremlin) and left with a package of economic preferences for billions of dollars.

Like most undereducated dictators of the 20th century, he is a natural born psychologist, and he understood all complexes and phantasies of the Russian “elite” perfectly well – their nostalgia for the lost imperial greatness, their need to have “younger brothers”, who are clinging to the palm holding supreme power, and exploited them, skillfully and predatory. However, he dismiss any thought that he is going to become just a Minsk governor or a secretary of a regional executive committee.

In the ice-hole of the delusion of grandeur, in which “the Russian political elite” had been messing about for decades, the union with Belarus is the Holy Grail, the first and decisive step to overcome “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. Something like the Anschluss with Austria for the German elite in the 1930-ies.

“The elite started to ask bashfully: “After all, Mr Lukashenka, when are you going to become a part of us, with all your constituent entities?” And the Great Slave said with dignity: “A Belarusian officer takes money. He takes lots of money. But exclusively as a sovereign and independent legal entity under international law.”

15 more years passed, and during the pre-New Year press-conference of the EurAsEC in Moscow, the two last dictators in Europe looked at each other with undisguised hatred. “No one will be able to bring Lukashenka into subjection,” the Great Slave made an insolent retort in presence of a few more post-Soviet crime bosses. Such offences could have never been forgiven in a yard of Petersburg, or in the high-crime Petersburg of the 1990-ies, or on the top of the Russian power.

It seems that Lukashenka has allowed for all possibilities. He takes both dangers to his life and challenges to independence and sovereignty of Belarus very seriously. Anschluss is impossible within the lifetime of Lukashenka. The Kremlin has finally realized that. But they have not realized yet that there will be no Anschluss ever, that’s why they are able to make one more reckless imperial attempt. Over the last two decades a national state and state self-awareness have been formed in Belarus. It was not there in 1996, when to its cost Moscow helped Lukashenka to make a coup and push aside from power the old Communist nomenclature. For 20 years Lukashenka had been stringing Moscow along, playing upon its imperial complexes masterfully, and defended from Russia his personal power, and at the same time Belarus’ sovereignty, as a wolf.

There is an impending danger that the “operation of the First Belorussian Front” for Lukashenka’s fraternal liquidation is to become even more stunning crazy scheme than “Crimea is ours”. But dictators who had been driven into a corner often act according to the logics of Shakespeare’s character:

For mine own good,

All causes shall give way: I am in blood

Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o'er.