Belarus has been preoccupied in recent days with President Alexander Lukashenko’s decision not to cancel this year’s annual May 9 Victory Day military parade, which marks arguably the country’s most important public holiday. “I must say that we cannot cancel the parade,” declared Lukashenko on Sunday, May 3. “I thought about it at length. Of course, this is an emotional and deeply ideological thing. It must be remembered that those people [World War II veterans] were dying, perhaps also from viruses and other diseases. But sometimes they did not […] think about it. And they died for us, no matter how lofty it sounds. And just think what people will say… They will say we canceled because we were afraid.” At the same time, the president warned the organizers that “no one should be dragged to this event,” including not the relatively few surviving Belarusian veterans of the war. Lukashenko issued an invitation to foreign heads of states (particularly of post-Soviet countries) to come to Minsk for the parade. But as the government newspaper Zviazda acknowledges, the Belarusian leader realizes that some of his foreign peers may choose not to come—not only out of fear of infection in the middle of a pandemic but also to “save face” or avoid looking hypocritical since they imposed quarantines and curfews in their own countries. “Let us hope someone arrives. But if they do not, we will hold a parade ourselves, as usual,” Lukashenko mused. At the same time, he called on Russian television to cover the ceremonies in Minsk.
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People walk past a monument to the founder of the Soviet Union Vladimir Lenin in Minsk on the day of the 150th anniversary of Lenin's birth on April 22, 2020, amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
