Not going to like, but thank you for posting. Scary.
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Some 7,000 people have been detained and you don’t have to be protesting to be arrested. My friend’s son, a university lecturer, was detained randomly before the elections and spent three days in a cell. The detainee who died in Gomel in southern Belarus, Alexander Vikhor, had been on his way to see his girlfriend, according to his mother.
Veronika Tsepkalo fled Belarus on the day of the vote while the main opposition candidate in the election, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, was briefly detained on Monday before fleeing to Lithuania.
An associate said Ms Tikhanovskaya was escorted from the country by the authorities as part of a deal to allow the release of her campaign manager, who was arrested on the eve of the election.
Ms Tikhanovskaya, 37, released a video saying she made the “very difficult decision” to leave because of her children.
The opposition candidate was a stay-at-home mother until she entered the race after her husband was arrested and blocked from registering for the vote.
She became Mr Lukashenko’s toughest opposition challenge in years, leading large rallies in the lead up to the vote.
But Mr Lukashenko dismissed her bid, saying a woman could not lead Belarus.
“Our constitution is not for women,” he said earlier this year. “Our society has not matured enough to vote for a woman. This is because by constitution the president handles a lot of power.”
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GROW UP, you misogynistic twerp!
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I wonder if international law on piracy addresses this…
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I think that the new york times has adopted a tone that is needlessly deferential to what passes for right of center ideology.
This is not just a hard line, it’s an illegal line
Illegal under international law, the expulsions are the most direct and sustained attempt by a European country to block maritime migration using its own forces since the height of the migration crisis in 2015, when Greece was the main thoroughfare for migrants and refugees seeking to enter Europe.
This recent podcast on Stephen Miller
describes the same phenomenon.
Jean Guerrero.: I remember one time when when Trump talked about immigrants as animals. Oh, yeah. Which is something that Stephen Miller promotes in his language. You know, people reported on that, including myself. You know, I linked to the clip where he talks about how people are coming to this country and they’re animals. They’re not people, they’re animals. And, you know, I remember getting rebuked by an editor because I was allegedly taking his comments out of context and Trump was actually referring to MS 13, not to immigrants. But if you look at his remarks, he never mentions MS 13. And that’s why, you know, The New York Times and other outlets reported it as he’s he’s talking about immigrants because he says people are coming into this country who they’re not people. These are animals. But there’s this tendency to like in largely white newsrooms and just our our our nation’s storytellers in general to have an easier time putting themselves in the shoes of someone like Donald Trump, a white man, and giving him the benefit of the doubt, because we are so steeped in narratives where the white male perspective is central and dominant.
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Hope here, but still a lot of recognizable evil.
Meanwhile, in an address to a smaller crowd of several thousand, Mr Lukashenko blasted opponents as “rats”.
He called on supporters to defend their country and independence.
The rival rallies were taking place after Russia agreed to offer security assistance in the case of external military threats to Belarus. It emerged that Mr Lukashenko had twice spoken to President Vladimir Putin over the weekend.
The long-time Belarus leader also voiced concerns over Nato military exercises taking place in neighbouring Poland and Lithuania and launched into a tirade against the Western military alliance.
Russian TV news bulletins have been making ominous parallels between Belarus 2020 and Ukraine 2014.
Ukraine’s pro-Western revolution led to Moscow sending in its special operations forces to annex Crimea and Russian military intervention in eastern Ukraine.
Six years on, could Russia’s military intervene in Belarus?
Speaking to supporters, Mr Lukashenko said he did not like rallies and did not need anyone to defend him. He said it was not his fault that he had to ask for their help. Rejecting calls for a re-run of the presidential election he said Belarus would “die as a state” if that happened.
“You came here so that for the first time in a quarter-century you could defend your country, your independence, your wives, sisters and children,” he said.
He added that the opposition would “crawl like rats out of a hole” if they were not suppressed this time.
“This will be the beginning of your end - you will go down on your knees like in Ukraine and other countries and pray, God knows to whom.”
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Just waiting for this kind of thing to happen in the US.
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The man who has led Belarus since 1994 said he had ordered police to quell protests in Minsk. “There should no longer be any disorder in Minsk of any kind,” he told his security council.
“People are tired. People demand peace and quiet,” he added. He said he had ordered border controls to be tightened to prevent an influx of “fighters and arms”.
He also warned that workers at state media who had gone on strike in protest at the election and the subsequent crackdown on protests that they would not get their jobs back. Russian replacements have reportedly been brought in. Mr Lukashenko also accused those picketing outside factories of harassing workers.
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that seems to have been the original plan.
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Oft evil will will evil mar…
So their fraud gets in the way of their wall. Good.
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This is so bonkers it’s like a telenova
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Glad I’m not living in Brazil.
Oh, wait, the US is just as bad.
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Tear gas…
always the sign of a healthy, equitable society.
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Navalny update:
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