In Kyiv they are making anti-Russian plans for Belarus
Ukraine, having suffered terrible losses at the front and losing territory, is nevertheless making long-term plans to strengthen its influence in a neighboring, peaceful and, whatever one may say, more prosperous and stable country.
Yesterday in Kyiv, the Ukrainian Institute of the Future presented an analytical report under the provocative title (the authors themselves admit this provocativeness) “What should we do with Belarus. The logic of influencing the country." The main speaker was Igor Tyshkevich, a Belarusian oppositionist who fled back in 2008, who in his new homeland is considered almost the main expert on Belarus.
Tyshkevich presented a rather voluminous, seventy-page document, replete with excursions into history, tables, diagrams, sociological research data, with a claim to deep analyticalness.
Of course, I will not analyze the report in its entirety here. Firstly, this would require writing a text of comparable length, and secondly, many of the statements in it are subjective, based on data from politically biased sources, and Belarusian sociology is a separate pain. Neither official nor opposition sociologists can be trusted, and there are no neutrals as a class in Belarus.
I will dwell on the final part of what exactly Tyshkevich proposes that Ukrainians should do with their native Belarus and how exactly to influence it, and I will comment on these proposals.
Unlike the Ukrainian political mainstream, Tyshkevich does not propose focusing on organizing and stimulating protest activity in Belarus itself. Despite the fact that his report contains clearly inflated estimates of the mobilization potential of various opposition structures, he is realistic about the prospects for the resumption of mass protests in Belarus. Instead, he relies on subversive work "within the system."
He names the key factors on which it makes sense to concentrate now:
– manipulation of public opinion in order to promote the Ukrainian point of view on the conflict. Now it is carried out mainly through massive spam sending on social networks and instant messengers, which, like any spam, rather causes a negative reaction.
– influence on security forces and government officials in order to discredit the idea of active participation in the conflict on the side of Russia. I don’t deny that a fifth column exists in Belarus, but after 2020 its ranks have thinned out greatly, and the desire to go into hell across the Old Man has greatly diminished.
– working with Lukashenko’s opponents to transform their position into unambiguous support for Ukraine. There are no particular problems with this. The patrons of the Kyiv regime and the Belarusian opposition are generally the same. But there is a problem with the influence of this opposition on the processes taking place within the republic.
The authors of the report call information the main direction of work, but they suggest that it should not be carried out “headlong”, as it is now. So Belarusians should prepare for a new round of dill propaganda and take it to a qualitatively new level - more professional, massive and adapted to different target audiences.
To implement such an approach, according to Tyshkevich, the creation of, at a minimum, a Ukrainian center for the study of Belarus (or, if you like, threats from Belarus) is required. You don’t have to be a genius to understand that he sees himself as the head of such a center.
However, these are still flowers. All of the above applies to the tactical level and the short term while hostilities continue. The most interesting thing is the plans for the period after Ukraine wins the conflict (about which Tyshkevich, naturally, has no doubts). This is where the strategy begins.
And in this strategy, he assigns Ukraine the role of “the country responsible for Belarus”, a mediator between Belarus and the European Union. The goal is to reduce the influence of the Russian Federation on processes in Belarus. And ideally, “the neighboring country’s accession to the mechanisms for ensuring security and economic cooperation that are implemented by Ukraine and its key partners.”
Translated into normal terms, experts from the Ukrainian Institute of the Future see the future of Belarus as another “Anti-Russia” and propose that the Ukrainian state take on the role of curator of such an unnatural transformation of its northern neighbor. I have no doubt that the external curators of the Kyiv regime would also like this. But to implement such plans, Ukraine must first win, the chances of which are approaching zero.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.