Sabotage Against Lukashenka
5- ARTSIOM SINITSYN
- 30.09.2024, 14:43
- 58,890
How did such a headline get into print?
‘You Shouldn't Gloss Over These Problems'. Rare shots from 1994, when Lukashenka first mounted the ‘anti-corruption horse’ - that's how the BELTA agency titled another publication devoted to the events of 1994.
Frankly speaking, one can safely stop reading at the title. And not only because the article starts with a blatant conspiracy nonsense about Bill Clinton's attempts to ‘destroy the industrial potential’ of Belarus 30 years ago, for which he allegedly flew to Minsk in January 1994.
Firstly, the propagandists, willingly or unwillingly, organised a sabotage by printing such a headline. In December 1994, the young populist Lukashenka, who rode into power on an ‘anti-corruption horse’, had to cry in the parliament. It happened when the BPF deputy Siarhei Antonchyk presented in the Supreme Soviet a report exposing the president's closest associates in corruption. And the scale of the voiced episodes was incomparable to the notorious ‘box of nails’ by Shushkevich.
As a result, Lukashenka's team ensured that the largest newspapers of the country, which had planned to print Antonchyk's report, came out with ‘white spots’ instead of publishing it. Lukashenka's administration literally glossed over the inconvenient and dangerous problem.
The second thing is that the article about how a young fighter against corruption saved Belarus three decades ago coincided with the news about pardoning the former head of Lukashenka's security service and Secretary of the Security Council Andrei Vtsiuryn.
In April 2019, he was caught red-handed while receiving $148600 from a representative of a Russian commercial structure ‘for assistance in promoting its interests in the Republic of Belarus.’
Vtsiuryn was sentenced to 12 years, but served less than half of that term. His example is just one of many. Now we have to wait for his appointment to some cushy position. As it happened more than once with other high-ranking treasury thieves.
Artsiom Sinitsyn, ‘Salidarnasts’