The Belarusian multi-vector approach has failed, so Minsk must make a foreign policy choice in favor of Russia. Political scientist Alexei Dzermant, close to the Belarusian president, wrote about this in his Telegram channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“The Belarusian state, having abandoned its own ideology, tried internally to reconcile different identities, believing that the pro-Western and nationalist part of the citizens would become loyal if they stopped being pressed. As a result, we got a mutiny.
In the foreign policy arena, the state believed that, due to its multi-vector nature, the West would not interfere in our internal affairs, but in fact we received a protest controlled by part of this West.
It is impossible to be friends with everyone, there cannot be multi-vectorism and neutrality when you are attacked. You need to make a choice, but in such a way that you are respected. This means a voluntary, conscious, honest choice of the side that will not betray and who really needs us. For Belarus, in my opinion, this is Russia,” Dzermant wrote.
The chairman of the “Civil Harmony in Belarus” movement, Artem Agafonov, reacted to this.
“Sometimes you still learn from mistakes, although very slowly. A few years later, Dzermant realized that it was impossible to sit on oncoming trains with the same…one. The obvious fact that in this case you can either fall and hit yourself painfully, or tear yourself to pieces, reaches some only through experience. And that’s not for everyone,” Agafonov wrote on his Facebook page.
The editor-in-chief of the Russian news agency Regnum, Modest Kolerov, commented much more sharply on the change in rhetoric of the Minsk speakers - his publication was blocked in Belarus the day before precisely for criticizing Lukashenko’s “multi-vectorism”.
“He's a common liar. trying to survive. It’s good that he’s young – he’ll spend most of his life eating his fruits,” Kolerov wrote.