Finale Is Getting Inevitable, Obvious

The landing of the plane and the subsequent escalation with the EU radically changed the balance.

Yesterday Telegram channels spread information that the siloviki are massively selling real estate. Which, of course, can speak of a readiness to leave the country at any time.

Objectively, it is difficult to truly verify this evidence, so how to perceive it is everyone's business. Someone may believe, someone may consider it a rumor. However, there is one important point. It is that, as they say, there is no smoke without fire.

Before the Boeing incident over the past few months, both the security forces and bureaucrats could exist quite calmly, becoming more and more convinced that they had “won”: there is practically no protest, no serious sanctions either, and there is a Russian support, albeit verbal.

However, the landing of the plane and the subsequent escalation with the EU radically changed the balance. In today's situation, those who are in the system have more reason to doubt that the final was successful for them than there was, for example, in September 2020. We will not talk about August - then everyone was in disarray.

To mobilize forces to fight its own people, the regime had to switch to the format of hostilities. This was repeatedly voiced by a variety of people aloud, but the logic of confrontation was present literally in their every action. Confrontation requires two sides. On the one hand, there was a mobilized and organized machine, on the other, a decentralized popular protest, and Tsikhanouskaya and Latushka, forced out of the country. Europe talked a lot but did little. Who to bet on - the choice was too obvious.

However, confrontation is a thing that is easy to get involved in, but from which it is difficult to disentangle. The suppression of the protests did not lead to the desired effect, and one side, in the absence of the other, had to look for and provoke the other, being confident that there would be no serious consequences anyway. The EU, the US, NATO - all these structures and the people that form them, least of all want to strain and conflict with someone: such things interfere with earning money and functioning calmly, this is non-pragmatic and irrational. However, the actions of the Belarusian side, and here we are talking not only about Ryanair, but also about a hybrid border war, put the “collective West” in a situation where it became impossible to get off with statements. First, because the challenges turned out to be quite real. Secondly, politicians there are forced to react to public opinion too, but it was formed, let's say, not entirely in favor of the official Minsk.

Ultimately, to date, the Belarusian regime has managed to do what it so persistently tried to, although uncertain this is what it really wanted: to formalize a real conflict in which the second side is no longer a decentralized and disorganized population, which you can beat and shoot, but a very powerful in economic and political terms enemy impersonated by the European Union, which, moreover, is backed by the United States. And this confrontation is now not invented as a pretext for beating up citizens, but quite real, albeit not “hot” in the form of a military threat, but full-fledged “cold” - in the political and economic plane.

By their rash actions, the authorities have opened another front against themselves, and at the moment only an idiot may not understand: Minsk can oppose the West only if there is not verbal, but resource support from Moscow, and just recently, there has been practically no support at all. Accordingly, in one form or another, the ending becomes inevitable and obvious even for the most slow-witted. It is comfortable to bet on the regime when it is waging a war against Tsikhanouskaya. But it’s not really comfortable when it’s at war with the West, which won even the USSR in the Cold War.

Recently, it has not been possible to write often, mainly for a simple reason: everything that is happening now in Belarus and around it completely fits into the logic that has been repeatedly stated, including here. The loss of internal legitimacy inevitably leads to existence in a regime of constant tension and multiplication of errors. Their accumulation to a critical level also inevitably leads to the finale.

Piotr Kuzniatsou, Telegram