Disputed Elections – week 21

Well, it kind of looks like this is over for now. There has been Christmas, New Years and no new significant large protests. I gather there are still flash mobs and small protests, but nothing like the tens of thousands in the street that there was. Two days ago the archbishop of Minsk resigned his post. He has been critical of Lukashenko and has been blocked from re-entering Belarus. Meanwhile Lukashenko is busy planning for a referendum on his constitutional changes. No date as to when that would be.

So, it appears that Lukashenko remains in power for now. The opposition is still out there and there are still small protests (including in St. Petersburg, Russia). Suspect this will simmer for a while. Who knows if there will be a spark that re-ignites the protests in mass or if Lukashenko has safely preserved his rule until the next election (which I gather is in 5 years) or his new constitution is adopted. This is his sixth term as president. He is 64. The main opposition candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya remains in Lithuania with her children. Her husband, a political activist, is currently in jail in Belarus. She is 38. Lukashenko says he will resign as president once the new constitution is put into place. Right now, it is not known what that constitution says and when it will be in place.

This is probably the last I will blog about this until something significant happens. It does appear that for now, Lukashenko has managed to put down a protest that had at one point maybe 200,000 people in the street. Early on, he was fairly heavy handed. This seems to fuel the opposition. He then backed down and waited, arresting/detaining several hundred protestors each week. This seemed to work. One wonders if there is a lesson there, which would be, if one tries too hard to crack down on protestors, one just fuels them. In the end, the protest resulted in the death of 4 protestors according to most counts. In contrast, the successful Euromaiden protests that overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014 was done at a cost of at least 104 people, and some provide much higher figures (up to 780). According to one rumor I heard, during the Euromaiden protests President Putin of Russia kept insisting that Viktor Yanukovych, President of Ukraine, crack down harder on the protestors. At the time, Yanukovych had deployed snipers to shoot at protestors but he apparently told Putin that it was politically impossible to do anything further.

When I first starting blogging about this on 13 August 2020 I laid out six possible scenarios:

1. Lukashenko manages to remain in power.
2. Lukashenko is replaced by someone in his entourage.
3. Lukashenko is overthrown and replaced by a democratic government.
4. Lukashenko is overthrown and replaced by a government that becomes an oligarchy or another dictatorship.

5. Russian intervenes.

6. Lukashenko forms a combined government with the opposition so as to head off Russian intervention.

 

Russian intervention could have several forms

1. To prop up Lukashenko, possibly in exchange for signing a treaty that surrenders some or much of their sovereignty.
2. To prop up a replacement for Lukashenko, also in exchange for signing a treaty that surrenders some or much of their sovereignty.
3. Russia annexes Belarus.

 

See: Events in Belarus | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)

For now, it appears that scenario one is the case. Suspect that will still be the case in twelve months from now. Who knows where we will be at in five years. Dictatorships have a tendency to survive for only one generation and Lukashenko is no longer young. 

 

 

 

P.S. The picture of the detained protestor is from previous months, I just happen to like it (“Beauty and the Beast”). She was identified over twitter (@A_Sannikov) as Natalia Petukhova. The arresting officer has not been identified. Picture came from @svirsky1 via @XSovietNews. I still do no know if she had been released, although many protesters have been detained, charged, convicted and later released.

 

 

 

 

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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