DISINFO: Belarus is a training ground for aggression against Russia
SUMMARY
Belarus is a place for training and experiments for the aggression against the East. One known extremist channel etablished around the issue of Belarus but outside of our land is working full-speed against Russia, thus showing the real purpose of the Western strategists.
RESPONSE
Recurring disinformation narrative about the aggressive anti-Russian position of the West.
The statements about planned hostile actions against Belarus as well as against Russia is presented without any evidence. The strained relations of the Western world (the EU and the US) with Minsk and Moscow resulted from the behaviour of Belarus and Russia.
Belarus showed an inadequate and brutal reaction to political protests. Widespread peaceful protests have been ongoing in Belarus since August 2020. These were triggered by discontent with the results of the Belarussian presidential elections in August 2020 which were not monitored by independent experts and saw Lukashenka re-elected as president for the sixth consecutive time since 1994. Both the EU and the U.S. referred to the elections as neither free nor fair and refused to recognise Lukashenka as the legitimate president of Belarus. According to international election monitoring organisations such as OSCE and Civil Rights Defenders, every single one of the last five presidential elections in Belarus has been unfair and unfree, which is the primary reason for the public discontent.
The protests were organised by civil activists and opposition politicians and attended by tens of thousands of citizens. Belarusian police met them with violent force, with thousands of citizens being subject to police brutality and torture. According to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the organisation had received “450 documented cases of torture and ill-treatment of people deprived of their liberty” by 1 September 2020. Some 40,000 supporters of the opposition have been sanctioned or arrested and most of the opposition’s leadership is either detained or has fled the country. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who was Lukashenka’s primary opponent in the elections, fled to Lithuania in August 2020.
In October 2020, the Council of the European Union imposed sanctions against 44 individuals for repressing and intimidating peaceful protesters. More recently, the EU strongly condemned the forced landing of a Ryanair flight in Minsk, Belarus, endangering aviation safety, as well as the detention by Belarusian authorities of journalist Raman Pratasevich and Sofia Sapega, and called for new sanctions.
As concerns the EU's policy towards Russia, it has imposed restrictive measures since 2014, including sectoral sanctions, as a result of the illegal annexation of Crimea and Russia's destabilising actions in eastern Ukraine. Formats such as regular high-level dialogues remain suspended in the absence of the full implementation of the Minsk agreements by Russia. These events have seriously affected bilateral relations.
The EU has also strongly condemned the assassination attempt using chemical weapons on Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny in 2020 and sanctioned 6 individuals and 1 entity as a result. There is unequivocal evidence that Navalny was poisoned using a Novichok-type nerve agent.
See earlier examples of pro-Kremlin media accusations of hostility against Russia or/and Belarus: EU groundlessly accuses Russia of interference in Western elections while pursuing anti-Russian containment policy; Pratasevich could tell how the West supported and coordinated protests in Belarus; Western sanctions are illegal and hostile actions; The West pursues anti-Russian campaign to encircle and destabilise Russia.