After the elections, Ukraine will remain hostile to Belarus
The Central Election Commission in Kyiv is still counting votes, but it is already clear that this composition of the Ukrainian parliament will mean serious progress in Ukrainian politics. The main one is that in the country, for the first time in its history, one party is guaranteed to receive a parliamentary majority.
Another news: two purely political technology projects will be presented in the Rada at once - the presidential “Servant of the People” and “Voice”, parties hastily put together under a popular celebrity from a diverse group of people, sometimes with opposing views. And this diversity suggests that the political farce in this long-suffering country is far from over.
Belarus is Ukraine’s closest neighbor and the events taking place there are also reflected in internal Belarusian processes. How do Belarusian politicians and the media react to another plot twist and change of scenery in the Ukrainian political theater?
In the XNUMX hours that have passed since the polling stations in Ukraine closed, of all the major politicians in Belarus, only Lukashenko himself touched on the Ukrainian issue in one way or another. But he was not talking about the elections, but about the fact that this country is a “common problem” of Europeans and Belarusians. Thus, he finally tried to convey to the head of the EU representative office, who was completing her mission in Minsk, a simple idea that since Europe had “tamed” Ukraine, it should be responsible for it.
Both officials and official media turned out to be laconic. The maximum is a statement of facts and dry, laconic comments. Apparently, the official position is still being developed, and making comments on such important issues is not accepted and is generally fraught with problems. It’s a delicate question - you need to simultaneously flatter your Ukrainian “partners” and not greatly anger the Kremlin and Russian public opinion, while hinting at your own mediation services, the demand for which remembers better times.
Opposition and “independent” pro-Western politicians and journalists seem to be more free to express their position, but even here, no thoughtful comments, analytics or forecasts are yet to be seen. However, the presentation of news from Kyiv here has interesting features.
Thus, on the morning of July 22, the main news on many Zmagar sites was not some Belarusian event or even the preliminary results of the Ukrainian elections as a whole, but the passage of a single single-mandate deputy into the new Rada. The last name of this deputy is Igor Guz
. “Nasha Niva”, the main mouthpiece of the nationalists, rejoices at his victory and with undisguised sadness says that there will be fewer radicals in the Rada, and completely frostbitten figures like Yarosh or the “White Leader” Biletsky have lost their mandates.
In fact, the victory of one Guz means almost more to the Zmagars than the victory of all the candidates from the Servant of the People party combined. Guz has been working closely with Belarusian national radicals since at least 2005, when he served a week and a half in a Belarusian prison cell, having taken part in mass riots in Minsk. He is the only Ukrainian politician who was twice banned by the Belarusian side from entering the country for a long time. Already being a deputy of the parliamentary committee on international affairs, he called on the SBU and Belarusian nationalists to create a network of “patriotic organizations” directly in Belarus.
In a word, openly, from the parliamentary rostrum, he persuaded Belarusian citizens to what the Belarusian Criminal Code calls “Treason to the State” and “Undercover Activity.” And the armed organizations of Belarusian militants participating in the conflict in Donbass were also created with the active support of the same Guz, without any respect for Belarusian criminal law.
A great friend of the Belarusian zmagars and an open enemy of Belarus itself, he will continue to serve in parliament and is unlikely to leave Belarusians alone, continuing to lobby Belarusian national radicals in Kyiv.
However, despite the “moderation” of the new government and the massive departure from the Rada of the very “toxic” “heroes of the Maidan”, the danger of exporting the Ukrainian “revolution” to Belarus has not gone away. Even though people like Guz remain in the minority, aggressive nationalism and Russophobia still remain the mainstream of Ukrainian politics. Maybe the neo-Nazi “Svoboda” did not make it into the Rada, but the main parties that entered it (except for the Opposition Platform) are now saying about the same thing as “Svoboda” 6 years ago. And Zelensky himself even turned out to be more loyal to the Belarusian militants from the ATO. He gives them citizenship while Poroshenko saw in them only raw materials for war.
The Ukrainian state at the level of ideology continues to remain hostile to Belarus and continues to remain under the control of the enemies of both Russia and the Union State. And no meetings between Lukashenko and Zelensky and hydrocarbon deals will change this
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