Signs of the Belarusian government’s rising self-confidence in the face of domestic protests and Western reproaches have been multiplying in recent weeks. First of all, arrests of opposition activists continue. Thus, on March 16, the authorities in Minsk apprehended two women, 32 and 42 years old, for exhibiting “unregistered symbols” (apparently, white-red-white flags) in public places. On March 17, four people were arrested in Grodno and charged with operating certain Telegram channels. Additionally, the Belarusian Investigative Committee made public meticulously detailed charges levied against the blogger Anton Motolko, who has been out of Belarus since July 9 but is still active online, with 140,000 subscribers to his blog. Second, the High-Tech Park in Minsk recently declared that, in 2020, it earned its highest export revenues ever, worth $2.7 billion—25 percent more than it brought in over the course of 2019. And that is despite all the talk about fleeing high-technology firms. Third, on March 20, President Alyaksandr Lukashenko declared that he had never promised his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, that Belarus would be conducting constitutional reform; rather, he just shared his plans with the Kremlin leader casually, as befits friends. However, “we will never kneel down even in front of friends,” Lukashenko added, in a manner rather reminiscent of the pre–August 2020 period, when the geopolitical situation was quite different from what it is today.
OP-ED
Grigory Ioffe: Parallel worlds in Belarus’s public politics
An opposition supporter wrapped in a former white-red-white flag of Belarus stands in front of law enforcement officers blocking the road during a demonstration called by the opposition movement for an end to the regime of authoritarian leader in Minsk on Sept. 20, 2020.
