Belarusian Protesters Gain Surprising Ally in Russian Media

August 21, 2020

6 min read

Belarusian Protesters Gain Surprising Ally in Russian Media

Since election day on August 9, protesters in Belarus have been filling the streets in an attempt to oust their president, Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power for 26 years. He has frequently been called The Last Dictator of Europe, and is accused of tampering with the election results. According to the official vote count, he received 80 percent of the votes, while his main opponent – 37-year-old Svietlana Tikhanovskaya – only received 10 percent of the votes.

This year, in particular, the vote seems rigged, as Tikhanovskaya and her husband before her had managed to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people all over Belarus for the last few months. As protests broke out, the Lukashenko administration initially tried to hold on to power with a hard response to the protesters. The first three nights of protest were met with shock grenades, thousands of arrests and rubber bullets – not to mention the police beating protesters by the hundreds even after detaining them.

Belarus is a small country of only 9.5 million people, but its location between Russia and the European Union has made it an arena for geopolitics for years. Although the country has mainly been supported by Russia, there does not appear to be much enthusiasm to save Lukashenko today in the Kremlin, though President Putin did congratulate him on his election victory. Surprisingly, Russian media outlets, frequently seen as state channels of disinformation, have been showing their support for the protesters.

“Russian media has actually been covering the protests with much enthusiasm, even exaggerating the police brutality in the first days,” Aliaksandre Herasimenka, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, told IranWire.

Neoliberal Interference

Not only have outlets like RT — one of the most famous media groups for disseminating disinformation — been writing about the protests in a way that highlights police brutality, they are also giving a voice to Russian politicians voicing harsh criticism of Lukashenko. One example is an article quoting a politician from the Russian opposition who compares Lukashenko to a “girl” who is ready to marry but is “undesirable” because she is “no longer a virgin,” a reference to Lukashenko’s attempt to work with both the European Union and Russia at the same time.

“This is the end of the Bolshevik regime in this Republic [Belarus]. Thanks to the Belarusians. Well done! Finally, you plucked up courage and said no to the dictatorship,” the politician says.

RT, though on the protesters’ side in many recent cases, has also seized the opportunity to lash out at the West, including by discrediting Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) as an American deep-state propaganda organ the US deploys when it wants to topple a government. This sits well alongside a former statement by the spokeswoman from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that said Russian officials had discovered foreign interference seeking to destabilize the country, meaning that the West had tried to interfere.

The article also quotes tweets by Ben Norton, a journalist who claimed the opposition in Belarus is in fact neo-liberal. While it is true that RFE/RL is funded by the US government, its coverage of the Belarus protests does not differ from other Western media – private or state-owned – though it might be more extensive in this type of coverage. Claiming that the opposition is neoliberal, however, is very hard to prove, as the only three demands the protesters have made are, first and foremost, that Lukashenko resigns and gives way to a new, free and transparent election, that the Election Committee resigns, and that political prisoners are released.

Nothing Lasts Forever

Though initially on the side of the protesters, Russian media is becoming increasingly critical of the Belarusian movement for democracy. In an article on mk.ru, Communist leaders from Russia have claimed that the fall of Lukashenko will hurt Russia and that Tikhanovskaya herself will be a terrible president.

“The protests and strikes taking place in Belarus are leading to the destruction of the state. Opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya has no program, she does not know what to do, neither in the economy nor in politics,” the article, quoting Communist Party leader Gennady Zyaganov, said.

It is a fair point that Tikhanovskaya has no strong political ambitions or any idea how to save a post-Lukashenko Belarus from economic ruin. After all, she was propelled into the candidacy when her husband, who tried to run for president in the first place, was jailed. She does not have any officially-stated policies on economy or reforms, but has only promised two things as a president: The release of political prisoners and a new election within six months.

Claiming that anyone would be a bad president is always fair, but in the case of Tikhanovskaya it is a way of misleading audiences away from the fact that essentially, if she has been honest up to now, she would become a president for the transition of power, and not a president of the country in the sense one would normally think of presidents.

Propaganda Failure

Strikes are spreading in Belarus, and even several news outlets that are normally firmly on the side of Lukashenko have been publishing and reporting about police brutality. Several outlets have even had strikes, and in some cases where directors or editors have been fired, the staff has quit their jobs too. Some state-owned media is still siding with the president, however.

This upheaval has made it hard for Lukashenko to control the flow of information in the country, and he has already tried several approaches. He initially tried to shut down the internet, but the messenger app Telegram found a way around the blockade, allowing protesters and journalists to communicate with the outside world.

After three days, the attempt to block the internet block was abandoned, allegedly because it had a heavy financial impact. According to NetBlocks.org, the price of shutting down the internet in Belarus is over 50 million dollars a day. And for a government under attack, the price of such censorship appears difficult to pay, in more ways than one.

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