Enemy spies prevent Raman Halouchanka’s government from keeping the economy from falling. After all, the collective West is being leaked particularly secret information about how Lukashenka’s officials are trying to bypass European and American sanctions, said Alyaksandr Lukashenka at a recent meeting with members of the government.
The report of the Minister of Industry Pyotr Parkhomchyk and Deputy Prime Minister Yury Nazarau on export indicators and finances turned into a spy production drama. It was all about Western pests at Belarusian plants.
“I have information that a few scoundrels are still there and they set a goal to inform the collective West about how Parkhomchyk and Nazarau are trying to bypass the sanctions,” Lukashenka told officials.
Lukashenka ordered the ministers to inform the enterprises’ directors to look for Western spies among the workers: “We have found several. They will get long jail terms… These are people who deliberately harm our economy and our state for the money of the Western secret services ”.
The search for spies and saboteurs is the next logical stage of the authoritarian regime’s repressive logic, explains political scientist Andrey Yahorau. When there is an order from the highest level to look for pests among entrepreneurs, they shake up the business. When bloggers are made guilty, there is a wave of arrests of bloggers. Now Lukashenka’s special services have jumped on the workers, as the peaceful civil resistance has not disappeared, and the problems in the economy are only growing.
“Sooner or later it may come down to hunting in our own agencies. Why have we punished everyone, but our figures are not growing? Who is to blame? Ministers, deputy ministers, executors of the administration vertical, who are in fact spies and saboteurs, and so on,” explains Andrey Yahorau, an analyst at the Center for European Transformation.
Workers who went on strike are being detained in Belarus. The Human Rights Center “Viasna” has learned the names of 16 detainees. They are employees of “Hrodna Azot” and the Belarusian Metallurgical Plant. Several of them have already been released, some are in the KGB remand prison.
“This is a new wave of worker intimidation. They already have very few rights and little freedom of association, expression, assembly. They are shown that even if you think that the collective West may need some information, expect that there may be such consequences,” said Syarhei Antusevich, deputy chairman of the Belarusian Congress of Democratic Trade Unions.
Earlier, information emerged about the detentions on the Belarusian Railways. Hanna Ablab, a graphic artist at the Transportation Control Center, and Syarhei Dzyuba, a former dispatcher, were detained for “treason”, as was Alyaksandr Hashnikau, a BMZ repairman. They are now kept in the “Amerikanka” — a KGB remand prison.
Meanwhile, state television recently reported information it had received from the KGB that a man had been detained for bringing weapons to Belarus and making shelters for terrorist groups.
“It’s such a regular thing, and we can’t believe it, because we have heard so much over the years. That there are rats in the water supply, the weapons of civilian activists, which were not found, the case of the “White Legion”, which also featured weapons, a Jeep broke through the border, and detained Wagnerians who inspired some military action here, and then disappeared somewhere,” Andrey Yahorau recalls.
At the same time, the KGB claims that the detainee is not just a weapons carrier, but a killer who allegedly was to murder deputy Aleh Haydukevich.
Yaraslau Stseshyk, Belsat
