Xarn posted:

the EU still won't do anything.

Cat Mattress posted:

What would you want it to do? Stage an invasion to liberate the country and annex it to Glorious Liberal Capitalist Empire of Western Europe? The EU does not have the capacity to do anything else than some token sanctions here and there; even if it somehow had the will to do something.

Sekenr posted:

Well yhat was a whole bunch of nothing? Or something? Im not sure who won. Yesterday was amazing, i live right in the center of basically where everything happened. I went outside when they cut off the internet, stoll dont undestand. We fought with omon, we won i think. I eventually went home to sleep, in the morning nithing changed. We fought the police all night and in the morning went to work everything is in perfect order. Maybe well fight again tobight who knows

Sekenr posted:

Thank you. And there was interesting thing светошумовые гранаты, not sure whats it called in english. Grenades that produce a lot of light and noise. First time it shocks you and after fifth time you just shrug it off, we are staying and thats that

https://t.me/reflectionbelarus posted:

Many of those who are not in Belarus/Minsk view last night's events as just another brutally suppressed protest and an overall loss for the protesters.

However, from Minsk, from the centre of it all, it doesn't seem like a loss.
1. There were no mass arrests. There were sporadic arrests of people after the fact, brutal and angry, with a sense of frustration and desire for revenge from the police. But generally speaking, the absolute majority of protesters were not affected.
2. The number of victims is very low. Again, isolated cases are terrible and tragic. But for many thousands of protesters, the dozens of people injured is a very low number rather than something extreme.
3. The unprecedented brutality of law enforcement was met by the protesters in kind. The most trained and well-equipped policemen and soldiers from all over the country were dispatched yesterday in Minsk at the cost of security in other regions. These fighters, with their heavy gear on a hot summer day, were simply exhausted by hours of confrontation with highly mobile groups of protesters. Water cannons and stun grenades resulted in a flashy image, but very little in terms of real results. The security forces did not manage to round up the protesters and crush them, everything was limited to dispersing the crowd.
4. There was an unprecedented level of solidarity and selflessness on display. Lone men throwing themselves at a crowd of law enforcement officers, open doors in flat blocks for those who tried to hide from the police. Signaling cars all over the city in the night, and then again in the morning.
5. The protesters did nothing to warrant such a harsh response from law enforcement. Nobody tried to occupy any government buildings, nobody even moved towards them. The goal was to show that we can't live like this anymore, and that was successfully accomplished yesterday.

HUGE PUBES A PLUS posted:

https://twitter.com/all_mary/status/1292609537720160256

Necronormiecon posted:

Is there some sort of a central coordination website that would tell me what to do and where to go? Or is this over? The internet is still (mostly) down. I managed to unfuck my windows laptop with a Psiphon app. iOS App Store is permanently down so phone internet won’t function without a vpn. I’m embarrassingly underprepared.

Sekenr posted:

I don;t know if there are any intelligence analysts like brown moses and hopefully not a mercenary piece of poo poo like brown moses in this thread or of they even care, but I have a bit of information. When I went out fro the first time I immediately ran into a group who very determinately was walking into epicenter of events. I wanted to start talking to them to join because safety in numbers and than I heard them speak to one another, they had very distinct accent. they were russian and than it just clicked together they were not a group. they were a UNIT. I laughed about Lukashenko's paranoid vision of life but I swear on my life that I understood this correctly.

Necronormiecon posted:

Is there some sort of a central coordination website that would tell me what to do and where to go? Or is this over? The internet is still (mostly) down. I managed to unfuck my windows laptop with a Psiphon app. iOS App Store is permanently down so phone internet won’t function without a vpn. I’m embarrassingly underprepared.

quote:

I still struggle to understand the dynamic between Lukashenko and Putin. Putin was the first person to congratulate him on his win, but Lukashenko is also saying that Putin is sending in his little green men to annex Belarus?

Are they allies or aren't they? If they are, is the little green man thing just an act by Lukashenko and why? and if they aren't allies what does Putin gain from defending Lukashenko, surely if he does actually want to take over Belarus it serves his interest to see Lukashenko overthrown so he can do his thing and get someone more pliable in charge?

HUGE PUBES A PLUS posted:

I've always understood Putin's take on Lukashenko as "he's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

HUGE PUBES A PLUS posted:

goblin week posted:

Big fan of Polish armchair strategists saying we have to support Lukashenko because otherwise Russia will annex Belarus and then they’ll be at our doorstep!!!!!

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Why don't any of these clods ever try to rig their elections so they look believable? Like winning with 55% or 61% of the vote would be perfectly adequate and way less suspicious but no, gotta go for a ridiculous blowout.

Paladinus posted:

I'm not keen on telegram channels, as you might have noticed, but this is by someone I know, so I'll just post it here.

Rust Martialis posted:

More probably

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_People%27s_Republic

goblin week posted:

Big fan of Polish armchair strategists saying we have to support Lukashenko because otherwise Russia will annex Belarus and then they’ll be at our doorstep!!!!!

mobby_6kl posted:

Some interesting if unsurprising takes on the situation

https://twitter.com/joshuayjackson/status/1292578688807120896?s=21

mobby_6kl posted:

Some interesting if unsurprising takes on the situation

https://twitter.com/joshuayjackson/status/1292578688807120896?s=21

mobby_6kl posted:

Some interesting if unsurprising takes on the situation

https://twitter.com/joshuayjackson/status/1292578688807120896?s=21

CMYK BLYAT! posted:

Tsikhanouskaya has most likely been detained after entering the CEC to lodge a dispute

https://twitter.com/Den_2042/status/1292870221942980608

On the other hand she's already stated that she doesn't intend to join the protests directly and they're pretty clearly not being directed by her personally; I'm not really sure why the authorities think this is going to help anything at this point.

That said saying that the authorities are thinking through their response in a careful, planned, measured fashion is perhaps giving them a bit too much credit.