Novaya Gazeta

By Natalya Radina, Charter 97

The situation in Belarus is a repeat of 2008 when, after the EU and the USA imposed sanctions, Lukashenko began to release political prisoners he had arrested during the 2006 elections. As a result, in early 2009, the dictator got an IMF loan that saved the country from default. For two years, the West tried to tame the Belarussian strongman by inviting him to all sorts of summits, and EU officials shook hands with “Europe’s last dictator”.

Since the “Bloody Sunday” of 19 December, the situation has been developing in the same direction. Faced with an economic crisis, Lukashenko again is trading off his political prisoners.

So we have started losing them. A lot of them - all over the world. Three GLONASS satellites were lost on 5 December. A Geo-IK-2 geodetic military satellite was lost on 1 February. The Express-AM4 space satellite was lost on 18 August. On 24 August, the M-12M Progress met with an accident while being launched by the Soyuz-U booster rocket and was destroyed...

A massive scandal has broken out in Moscow. Several days before the start of the new school year, directors of dozens of Moscow schools (we have confirmed information about forty) received an odd directive: sack all their catering personnel and dismantle all the equipment. The reason was that the tender to provide school meals had been won by a company called Сonсord, but its triumph turned out to be a failure...

Our country is at the juncture between Asia and Europe, the plate under us vibrates, turning some of us into predators and others into angels...

There were no high hopes on the eve of the biathlon championship in Yugorsk in Khanty-Mansiisk (see Novaya Gazeta No.22, 2 March 2011), but reality was worse than the gloomiest forecasts: our squad was lucky to place sixth (the male team...