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[Rev Jones]

The biggest news in Europe and Russia for abot two months now has not been EU policy, refugees, Brexit, or the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Navalny. It's been the recent uprising in the dictatoria state of Belarus and its large geopolitican conseqences.





Belarus president Lukashenko pleading for troops and assistance with a laidback in control Putin on September 14. Notice the body language of both presidents.





For 26 years Belarus president Lukashenko has been in office as the last dictator of Europe. All elections were rigged. Lukashenko, formerly the manager of a communist farming cooperation rose to power after the USSR fell. At first his reforms were fairly successful and he was well liked by the voters. This changed dramatically over time.


In the weeks leading up to this year's election there were mass protests in the streets in the big cities for the first time. Opposition candidates for various parties had been imprisoned or slapped with lawsuits. In the end the oppositon and the voters rallied around the wife of one of the opposition leaders (who himself had been taken out of the political game by Lukashenko). This housewife, with no previous experience in politics, led the mass protests.


Journalists and protestors (all protest were peaceful) were jailed, protestors were also tortured in jail. State owned factory workers were forced to vote Lukashenko or they would lose their jobs. Additional large scale voter fraud happened during election day.


In the end Lukashenko won and the few remaining opposition leaders were imprisoned, kidnapped never to been again, or forced to leave the country.


Why does all of this matter? Lukashenko's reign has survived international geopolitical powerplay because he kept a balance between the EU and Russia.


When Lukashenko came to power he signed an integration treaty with Russia under its weak president Jeltsin (basically a drunkard), in the hopes of Lukashenko himself becoming the leader of that Russia-Belarus union. We're talking about a customs and trade union here with an essentially joint military force as well.


But when Putin came to power Lukashenko knew the jig was up as Putin had a much stronger grip on things and Lukashenko would be the junior partner, merely a puppet 'leader' in charge of a Russian province nominally known as 'the country' Belarus. Therefore Lukashenko never kept to his end of the Integration Deal, causing lasting friction between Russia and Belarus and in effect making Belarus a large bumper state between the EU and Russia.


The EU was only too glad not to interfere with the dictatorial regime in Belarus.


Mind you, all of this is connected to oil pipelines as well from Russia leading to the EU via various routes.


Now that mass protests were happening in July, August and September, leading up to the Belarus elections, it looked like Lukashenko would be overthrown. He was summoned to Russia by Putin to finally make the Integration Deal happen. In return Russian troops were stationed at the Belarus-Russian border, unofficial Russian government agents were sent into Belarus to help contain the protests and Russian journalists took over Belarus media.


And so Ptin has once again shifted geopolitical relations in his favor and now looms larger than ever over the European continent. Belarus' neigboring countries like Poland, Lithuania and Estonia feel threatened, especially since all of them were at a recent point in history ruled by the USSR.


After recently annexing part of Ukrain, waging war in another part of Ukrain and after past wars with Georgia and other countries and regions near Russua Putin has steadily tightened his grip on the larger region.


With the ice melting near the North Pole he is also looking at new ship routes for both trading and military reasons (e.g. far reaching missile launch platforms on ships)


At the same time Putin has to stay ahead of the internal power struggle in Russia with the opposition coming up wth a nifty system of voter advice for people in local elections (pointing voters to nationalist parties etc that are not friends with the democratic opposition at all but which are also NOT under Putin's influence, making Putin lose power îthe Russian parliament by consequence) and mass protests in the eastern provinve of Chabarovsk that have lasted for three months now as the uncooperative province leader who did not want to take orders from Putin (and was hugely popular with the locals) was replaced with a Putin lackey