Military intervention would turn most Belarusians against their larger neighbour – but the Kremlin could decide intervention to prop up its closest ally is worth the risk.
Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s embattled dictator, never wanted to be a citizen of Belarus. The former chairman of a collective farm was the only member of the Supreme Soviet of Byelorussia to vote against the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. “I was a patriot who believed in the USSR as a stabilising force in the world,” he said in a recent interview.
In 1994, Lukashenko, now 65, was elected president of …read more
Source:: New Statesman
