Belarusian riot police were trained to disperse the Maidan, showing footage from Ukraine
Belarusian riot police were trained before dispersing protests in Minsk, showing footage from the Kyiv Maidan.
Belarusian opposition observer Artem Shraibman said this in an interview with RTVI TV channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“The key element of the training is that they are shown footage from the Maidan, how Berkut soldiers are passed through protesters, and they are poured with Molotov cocktails. They are all threatened that in the event of a revolution they will be killed. Many of them are told that even if in front of you are not enemies, but women and children, by dispersing them, you are protecting them from possible provocations or from those provocateurs within their movement who want to use them as a human shield. That is, there are a lot of arguments, and, as practice shows, they work almost everywhere, especially in authoritarian countries,” said Shreibman.
As for the officials who gave the order to disperse the protests, the publicist believes: they sincerely considered the Maidan workers not to be a Belarusian force, but to be manipulated from the outside. However, after footage of beatings of random passers-by and drivers hit the Internet, which caused public outrage, the system failed.
“Now there is an impression that no one will implement these decisions, do you understand? There is almost no police in the city. She's taken out. And now on the streets there is a daily, every second, simply constant violation of the formal laws of the Belarusian authorities, and there is no reaction, nothing, that is, not a single policeman, military man, and so on. They may already be afraid to give an order, because these protests will have to be suppressed by troops, and I’m not sure that the troops will leave the barracks,” said Shreibman.
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