All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, it's been a little while, but we got Gilbert Doctorow back on the phone.
He's an American living in Belgium and keeping a very close eye on events in Russia and in far Eastern Europe in Russia's sphere of influence.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gilbert?
Oh, I'm doing fine.
It's good to hear from you.
Really happy to have you on the show here, and you wrote this really important article for Antiwar.com, Belarus, Why the Ongoing Political Unrest is Unlike Maidan.
Now, Maidan, of course, is a reference to the American and European-backed street putsch in Ukraine in 2013 and 14, culminating in the coup of February 2014, and then the war and the rest of that.
But in Belarus, you say the situation's quite different, and I know so little about it.
I guess I'll just let you start wherever you think we need to start.
Maybe if you could just talk a little bit about the current president, how long he's been in power, and the current election that's in dispute, and so forth.
As President Lukashenko in Belarus has been in power for 26 years, he's been called the last dictator in Europe and his country, and he personally was subject to EU sanctions until he intervened in the crisis over Donbass in Ukraine.
This is following the events of Maidan, following the Russian takeover of Crimea.
There was the threat of war between Russia and Ukraine.
There was a war on the ground within the southeastern part of Ukraine.
It's called the Donbass, which is predominantly Russian-speaking.
And Mr. Lukashenko offered his assistance to mediate between the parties, which led to what's called the Minsk agreement, that is, the four-way negotiations, France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine, to monitor and, in the best of circumstances, to resolve the crisis between Russia and Ukraine over Donbass.
So in that case, because he played such a positive role in an issue that was burning hot for Europe, Europe drew back and decided that Mr. Lukashenko was an acceptable member of the European family.
What has happened in the last two weeks, where presidential elections were held...
I'm sorry, Gilbert, on that last point, let me clarify, make sure I understand you right.
You're saying that because of Lukashenko's willingness and effective willingness to host the meetings that led to the Minsk 1 and 2 agreements to bring, at least mostly, an end to the war in eastern Ukraine, that that cost him legitimacy with the European Union or that gave him some legitimacy with the European Union?
That gave him legitimacy.
I see.
Okay.
I wasn't sure if you were saying they really resented that he made this peace deal, because France and Germany really wanted the peace deal at the time, right, in 2015?
And because he offered his services as a good broker, and these services were deemed useful, all the criticism of Lukashenko within Western Europe was dropped.
We didn't hear anything about it.
Still, there were street demonstrations following the contested election of two weeks ago, the presidential election at which the results were declared to be 80 percent of the vote for Mr. Lukashenko.
Now, while it is reasonable to believe that Lukashenko won a majority of the votes because he has done a great deal for his country and that the relatively conservative population appreciates that, GDP in Belarus has risen substantially during his 26 years in power.
Employment has been stable.
The major industries which existed from Soviet times and remained in state control, they have been major exporters of heavy equipment, first and foremost to Russia.
And so the economic gains from the close alliance with Russia were felt by the population in improving living standards, although by no means comparable to those in Western Europe, or even to neighboring countries like Poland.
Those countries all enjoyed very heavy Western investment, and of course Belarus has not had that at all.
The conservative government that he's led by maintaining state enterprises avoided the scandalous takeover of state assets in privatizations that took place in Russia and also took place in some of the East European countries.
So Belarus has not known the kind of great disparity in wealth between oligarchs and the general population that we saw before Mr. Putin came to power in Russia and that we see to this day in Ukraine.
For these reasons, it was reasonable to assume that he would receive a majority or close to majority in the elections.
However, that he was reported to receive 80% begs credibility.
And so I think you have to be rather bound to Mr. Lukashenko to believe that these were properly registered voting.
All right, there were street demonstrations, they were crushed mercilessly by his security forces.
And this raised flags in Western Europe, too, by among the liberals who run European institutions and who cry over time over issues of human rights.
They felt that they had to make statements and to defend the interests of the Belarus population in opposition.
And there you have it.
We've had a lot of indications coming from neighboring countries, particularly Poland, to a lesser extent Sweden, that it was time to topple Mr. Lukashenko.
So for these reasons, because it looked like we have another orange revolution, another revolution fomented by Western intelligence, there are people who've compared the unfolding events in Belarus to what happened in Ukraine in the period from October-November of 2013 to the, ultimately, the overthrow of the president, sitting president, in February 2014.
That's what's called the Maidan period.
In fact, some astute observers, even in mainstream, even in mainstream journalism, have in mind particularly the Financial Times, which has not shown itself for the last 20 years to be any particular friend of Russia, least of all to Mr. Putin.
They, in their original reporting, and in their reporting even to this day on the events in Belarus, have pointed out this is generally a Russian sphere of influence.
And they have pointed out that the opposition to Mr. Lukashenko does not bear a resemblance to the opposition to the president, Yanukovych, in Ukraine in February 2014.
Why not?
Because in Ukraine there were the rallying cries were, enter, we want to join the EU, we want to join NATO, and we are against Russian domination.
In Belarus today, as reported faithfully by the Financial Times, nothing of the sort has been going on.
There is no discussion of joining the EU.
There's no interest in NATO.
There's only a motivating the opposition forces by their own acknowledgments to the press, the wish to have new elections, fair, transparent, and internationally supervised, where they believe Mr. Lukashenko will be removed.
That's of course open to discussion, whether he would win or lose a new election.
But the main point is that this, on the opposition side, there's no comparison with what happened in Ukraine in 2014.
My contribution in the article that you're referring to was to look at the other side of the equation, which nobody has discussed.
Who is the president of Ukraine, and how is he different from Mr. Yanukovych?
The difference is glaring.
Mr. Yanukovych was in a weak position.
He had already, this was not his first time as president.
He had been elected four years before, and he was removed because those elections were said to be unjust and not transparent or fair.
He had the experience already of being removed from power.
He also was perfectly aware that a substantial part of the population of Ukraine, particularly outside his stronghold areas of predominantly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, was against him and militantly against him to the extent that they would support a putsch.
For these reasons, Mr. Yanukovych accepted European mediation, which incidentally is what was offered last week by none other than Emmanuel Macron, the president of France.
He offered his good services to help mediate between Mr. Lukashenko and the opposition, playing exactly one for one where we were in Ukraine in 2014.
As I said, Mr. Lukashenko is no Yanukovych.
He is a man who has been ruling for 26 years, who has not had any serious opposition until now, and he is by temperament, I would say, a very brave person.
Brave or stubborn or whatever you want to call it, he has put his life at risk.
He has gone out to places of demonstration, as in the case of a few factories, and he has stood up and argued face to face with his opposition, with people who call upon him to resign.
And he has told them in no uncertain terms that they will get new elections in the near future only over his dead body.
Well, that is, as I said, either a statement of great, great courage or a statement of great obtuseness.
I think it's courage.
He is a combative personality, and he has shown himself to be hyperactive.
He has traveled to the western frontier of Belarus to supervise the mobilization of the Belarus Armed Forces to ensure that NATO doesn't use the disturbances within his country to violate the sovereignty of Belarus.
So on both sides of the equation, the opposition is not comparable to what we saw in Ukraine, and the president of the regime is not comparable to what we had in Ukraine before the overthrow of Mr. Yanukovych's government.
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What about the parallel with American intervention there?
When I see these people talking about the slipper revolution, it sounds like right out of the NED playbook, orange revolution, cedar revolution, lemon revolution, denim revolution was I think when they tried this in Belarus back in 2005 is what I learned from Dan McAdams.
Yes.
It's hard to see an American participation in the plots to overthrow Mr. Lukashenko.
It's much easier to see plots by Poland.
We have to look at the geography.
Poland, of course, has a border with Belarus, and Poland has historical claims on parts of Belarus.
When Mr. Lukashenko went to the West to Grodno when he was mobilizing his troops, this is an area which Poland would very much like to have returned to them.
After World War II, the Soviet Union, Mr. Stalin changed the borders in Eastern Europe, and generally speaking, Poland was moved to the West.
Part of the territory that was once historically Polish is now part of Belarus.
It's understandable, and this also has to be said, history does not repeat itself, but history doesn't disappear either.
The territories that we're speaking about were, for the last 500 years, contested between several major powers, principal among them Poland and Russia, of course also Sweden, and of course also Turkey.
In the given case before us is the interest of Poland.
It is, as your audience may be aware, the current administration in Warsaw is under heavy criticism from the liberal majority running the EU institutions, who are self-proclaimed defenders of human rights and democracy promoters.
Poland, like Hungary, is in the doghouse as regards the leadership of the European institutions.
In the case of Poland, it's because of what they call the attacks of the ruling party on the judicial system, which puts into question the rule of law.
That is the rallying cry of Brussels against Poland.
It's very convenient for the Poles now to present themselves as defenders of human rights and democracy in a neighboring state of Belarus.
For this reason...
It is the Ukrainian template though, right?
This is what Justin Raimondo called it back after the Orange Revolution in 2004, and then when they began they did the tulip slash lemon revolution in Tajikistan, and all the rest of this in the second half, especially the Bush years there.
It seems like it's effective, because what happens is you dispute an election, whether it's really stolen or not, like in 2004 it wasn't really stolen, but they just pretended it was, but then either way, what you do is you refuse to accept the result and go home.
You just stay out there, and somebody comes up with the money, whether it's the NED or George Soros, you know, NGOs and these kinds of things.
Somebody fronts the money to essentially pay these protesters to keep protesting and not go home and back to work until they get what they want.
Some form of regime change or power sharing agreement or some kind of a thing.
So it seems like, I don't know if the Poles are financing it or who's financing it, but sure looks like the NED type blueprint, you know?
So you're putting this into American context, and I would like to say that the United States today also is not the same as the United States in 2014.
We have a president who does not support this sort of regime change, not at all.
And while the U.S. intelligence agencies, the CIA and otherwise, run on autopilot, I think they do not enjoy the wink coming from the White House, or more particularly in the case of the Obama administration, coming from Joe Biden.
Let's remind ourselves, this is very relevant to the upcoming election in November.
Mr. Biden was one of the most aggressive advocates of an imperialist American foreign policy.
And especially in Eastern Europe.
In fact, he's mentioned in the late phone call of Victoria Nuland, saying, we're going to get the vice president in on this to help glue this thing together, make this work.
And that's, you know, planning the coup in Ukraine in February 2014.
Well, history, as I said, doesn't repeat itself, but we cannot ignore, if we want to ignore the history of 500 years ago, I can understand that.
We cannot ignore the history of five years ago.
And Mr. Biden is the same Mr. Biden who was instructing the Ukrainian parliament what to do next, who was instructing the Georgian parliament what to do next, and who was telling Mr. Putin in 2011 they shouldn't even think about running for president in 2012.
It would be nice if he took over the chairmanship of the Russian Olympics organizing committee.
This is the man whom we have faced the prospect of reelecting, of electing, I should say, in November.
He is the all-out American imperialist.
Now, the government of Mr. Trump is not a bunch of angels, but they have no support, but they do not give any support to the kind of NED program that you were talking about.
If something like that happens, it happens under cover and without their explicit support or permission.
That's a very big difference.
But let us not think that everything that happens in Europe and Eastern Europe is run by American puppet masters.
We have a few puppet masters here in Europe.
Well, you know, I mean, the thing about the CIA is they're very rarely puppet masters, but they're always trying to get a wedge in somewhere if they can have an effect.
It doesn't make them the boss of it all.
Well, for example, I mean, I think the presumption is that if Lukashenko was somehow overthrown or had to share power with the opposition, that even though, as you said, this would not affect Belarus's relationship with the European Union or NATO or anything like that going that far, it would help bring Putin down a peg by taking away someone who is a faithful ally of his.
Is that correct?
I wouldn't want to personalize it this way.
There is a state to state relationship between Russia and Belarus, which is completely different from the relationship between Russia and Ukraine when they went into crisis.
Russia and Belarus are essentially a single state.
That's something we should not overlook.
They have a union alliance.
Therefore, when Mr. Lukashenko calls upon Mr. Putin to give him assistance with police forces, it's his own state, honestly.
Of course, there are differences.
They are not completely unified.
They don't have the same currency, but they do have a treaty which makes them more than allies and a little bit less than a unified state.
In fact, I read an article.
I thought it was important.
The headline said Putin prepared to send troops to Belarus.
But then in the article, it says no police.
He's prepared to send civilian domestic police into Belarus to help, which is maybe bad enough.
But the Americans didn't seem to understand the discrepancy.
But the actual quotations had it.
You can excuse their failure to understand it because the Russian original uses a term that is very distinctive and it could lead to misunderstanding.
It is the forces of law and order.
That is exactly what Mr. Putin said.
He didn't say police and he didn't say army.
The forces of law and order.
So you can leave it to your own judgment whether these are special forces or something or other.
But the point is he has every right to do that.
There are all of the legal room for that exists in the agreements, the state to state agreements between Belarus and Russia going back some time.
But before we end this discussion, I don't want to let Mr. Lukashenko off the hook, which is what would seem to be the case.
The mess that he's in is largely of his own making.
And when people say, oh, yes, Mr. Putin doesn't want to let a fellow authoritarian go down because it could somehow damage his position in his country.
This is rubbish.
This is for schoolchildren.
The thinking of people like Putin and people like Lukashenko is on a different plateau entirely and it's not the kindergarten stuff that you find in most American mainstream coverage.
The reason why Mr. Putin would not think of allowing a change in alliances or of orientation of Belarus is because of one reason, the strategic importance of Belarus to Russian national security.
That is a buffer between Russia and Poland and Russia and NATO.
And it gives a bit of space for strategic space that you need in any conventional warfare.
For that reason, the idea of Mr. Lukashenko going down or his regime going down is unthinkable and will not happen.
And the man may go, but the alliance with Russia cannot go.
The Russians will not tolerate it.
Anybody who has half a brain in the West will accept that fact.
Yeah.
Yep.
That's what Dan McAdams said, too, was, you know, whether the Americans are really intervening in the degree to which they are or not may remain unknown.
But one thing is certain, and that is Russia will win this because for them, this is everything.
It's not even Ukraine.
Belarus is even more important than Ukraine to them.
Well, one part of Ukraine was important and they took it.
That is, there was a security pressure dependent on possessing the Crimea and the naval base in Sevastopol, and they retained it and they would have retained it under all circumstances because it was a vital threat to their national security.
And so it is with Belarus.
And as James Carden pointed out to me, it was actually the British parliamentary report that explained that after the coup, there was a letter signed by, I think, three former Ukrainian presidents saying now is the time to kick Russia out of the Sevastopol naval base.
And it was only then that they made their move when it was clear that this was actually in play.
They had been happy with the status quo since 1991, that fine, let Ukraine control the peninsula as long as we get to keep our naval base.
And they had never seized it before.
It wasn't until after the coup and the threat to kick them out and turn it into a NATO.
In fact, Putin joked that, you know, as much as we love our NATO partners, we thought that it would be better for them to come and visit us there at the holidays instead of us coming there to visit them at our former base.
American forces did visit.
It's not been reported in the press, but there was a conflict of Americans landing at Theodosia on the eastern coast of Crimea.
And there was a bloody confrontation with Russian forces.
You're talking about in February or March of 2014?
That's right.
And this happened where and when?
And what can I read about it?
The town of Theodosia.
It is on the eastern coast of Crimea.
So the idea that Americans would land there and would take possession of that was not an idea.
It was certainly a part of the road map that was being supervised from Washington.
It just didn't happen.
The Russians didn't accept it.
And they kicked them out.
But the question of Mr. Putin and what this means for him, there is a difference in these regimes.
I don't like to use the word regime, but since everybody does, let's keep the vocabulary the same.
The Belarusian government under Mr. Lukashenko has quashed all opposition.
It sent candidates for Toronto, who would be running against him, to prison.
It has not been very tolerant in its dealing with civil society in Belarus, and civil society has not grown and prospered.
In Russia, it's a very different situation.
In Russia, there is opposition.
There are opposition parties in the Duma, and the two leading parties, one is the Nationalist Party of Mr. Zhirinovsky, the LDPR, and the other is the Communist Party, the communists retain even today, after all that's happened, after all the old Bolsheviks dying off, so to speak, in the last 30 years.
They still have about a 20 percent poll in national elections.
Mr. Zhirinovsky has 15 percent.
Mr. Zhirinovsky's party controls Khabarovsk, as we all know today.
It controls what has very strong representation in much of the eastern Siberia and out to Vladivostok.
People don't talk very much about that, but Russian politicians are very well aware of it.
So there are opposition parties who have their own planks, their own policies that exist, and even though they are not given much encouragement, they are not driven out of existence.
So if there were to be a kind of dispute over electoral results in Russia, such as happened in 2011, it's unlikely to happen again in Russia, but nonetheless, if such a thing were to develop in Russia as has developed in Belarus, Mr. Putin and all his successors have someone on the opposition to talk to who is level-headed and not going to burn and ruin the state.
Mr. Lukashenko does not.
Because of his own actions and inaction over the last 26 years, he has created a desert around himself.
And that is a great problem.
Right.
I'm so sorry that we are so over time, and I just got to go.
I could talk to you all afternoon, and I hope we can do this again soon, Gilbert.
Appreciate it a lot.
Well, thanks for having me.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Gilbert Doctorow.
And here he is, first of all, he wrote the book, Does Russia Have a Future?
, and he wrote this article for Antiwar.com, Belarus, Why the Ongoing Political Unrest is Unlike Maidan.
