Lukashenko Is "cooking Up" New Outlandish Ideas
3- 1.08.2026, 14:25
- 3,522
The story at the military registration and enlistment offices in the countryside continued to unfold.
The commander-in-chief’s smooth shift in rhetoric from “let’s just avoid war” to “we’re preparing for war” gives rise to grotesque perceptions of reality—first and foremost by the commander-in-chief himself.
At first, we were all surprised that military commissars were sent out to the fields... military commissars, who went to see how the triticale was heading and how the threshing was going on the farms. The appearance of military personnel on collective farm land sparked laughter and bewilderment. Perhaps did someone take the phrase “battle for the harvest” too literally?
But just the other day, the story took a new turn: the chief specialist on all matters once again took an interest in the state of affairs in agriculture. A new approach has been proposed for those who violate work discipline and those who fail to fulfill their job duties: “Anyone who doesn’t know how to work—off to the army and to the southern border. Into the forest. Our guys—the special operations forces—are deployed along the Ukrainian border on my orders. A week of training—grenade launcher, machine gun—and off they go, to join the special operations forces.”
So, if a person can’t handle their duties and performs poorly, should they be sent to the army? You can’t take seriously the talk of a week of training that will bring their proficiency with weapons up to the level of special operations forces, though it’s not out of the question that our special operations forces are just like everything else.
But aside from the obvious absurdity and impracticality of Lukashenko’s latest whim, the situation highlights another important aspect.
They propose sending “negligent, misbehaving workers, good-for-nothings, drunkards, slackers, and idlers” to the army as a form of punishment. This means that instead of creating narratives and a context in which defending the Motherland against an aggressor is an honorable and socially useful endeavor, the idea is being instilled in people’s minds that the army is a kind of prison. Moreover, judging by who is being proposed for conscription, it is a place filled with the least combat-ready elements.
It is clear that in Lukashenko’s mind, there may envisages that all sorts of “anti-social elements” will be re-educated on the country’s troubled southern borders, but it’s hard to imagine exactly how special forces are supposed to re-educate the “lazy and delinquent.” They certainly lack the tools, the expertise, and the understanding. And the approach itself looks like something out of a Soviet film from the Stalin era, where the collective, through its “healing influence,” reforms drunkards, idlers, and slackers alike.
In short, instead of enhancing the prestige of military service—since you’re so afraid of an invasion by “Banderites” and NATO—the course has been set to shape the army’s image as a place of exile and punishment. How this might strengthen the country’s defense capabilities is a mystery.
But everything falls into place when we remember that the main enemy and opponent of today’s regime is the free and right-thinking citizen of Belarus.
The internal enemy gives the dictatorship no peace, and all these scare stories and delusional ideas are created both to intimidate that enemy and to rally its supporters. True, given how absurd they are, they scare very few people. And as for how much they actually boost morale, that’s hard to say, too.
Supporters of the current government seem ready to applaud even the regime’s most outlandish ideas. However, something suggests that such support is far from sincere.
Sergey Kovalchuk, “Solidarnast”
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