The international situation both triggered the ongoing crisis in Belarus—at least in the minds of some observers—and continues to have implications for its evolution. According to Belarusian KGB head Ivan Tertel, the August–September 2020 rallies protesting the official presidential election results were expressly sparked from the outside. Purportedly, former United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Carpenter, who is close to U.S. President Joseph Biden, was the commander-in-chief of the entire soft power operation that also involved Polish and Lithuanian intermediaries and agents of influences inside Belarus. The Belarusian opposition, naturally, largely disagrees; and their view is even shared by Russia’s premier political commentator, Feodor Lukyanov.
Protests in Belarus
OP-ED
Grigory Ioffe: The international dimension of Belarus’s political crisis
A young woman stands with a poster reading 'I am, we are Roman Protasevich' and the Belarus flag as passengers disembark from a Ryanair passenger plane from Athens, Greece, that was intercepted and diverted to Minsk on the same day by Belarus authorities, after it landed at Vilnius International Airport, its initial destination, on May 23, 2021.
