Ex-Official: State Apparatus Hates Lukashenka, He Will Have To Flee

Post-election protests on August 9 will end in the people's victory.

Aliaksandr Plaskavitski, the former head of the Main State and Legal Department of Lukashenka’s Administration, told Radio Svaboda that he didn’t expect the Belarusian people to be able to "boil up" so quickly and energetically. The ex-official analyzed the differences between the current situation and previous years, and told in which cases Lukashenka could leave power:

- He (Lukashenka - edit.) will leave in two cases. The first is the most real. If he runs out of options, he will most likely run away. And what are his options? He knows how to lure money from other countries, primarily from Russia. Once they stop giving him money, he will have nothing to rely on. After all, he has no friends, no support even in his own family, and the state apparatus hates him.

Even those people whom he considers to be the most loyal have been humiliated by him so many times that they will recoup these humiliations at the first opportunity. So as soon as he has no opportunity to feed them normally, they themselves will tell him: "Get out of here, and quickly."

In the end, these people too will come to the conclusion that it is better to give it up and try to keep at least something, than to disgrace further.

This process may not end on August 9. But the entire election campaign (this year's - edit.) shocked me greatly. I did not expect our people to be able to boil so quickly and vigorously. And this boiling will definitely not end after August 9. Everything that the authorities did during this election campaign provoked popular outrage. Therefore, the people will definitely win, and Lukashenka will have to flee from here.

In 2010, he managed to retain his main source of funding, Russia.

Now the situation is completely different. Lukashenka has recently greatly annoyed not only the Belarusian people, but also Moscow. For too long, he has been making fools of them, and did not give back what they asked. And now, against the background of the arrests of the Wagner PMC militants, he has ruined relations with the Kremlin - and, therefore, has deprived himself of his most important source of funding.