Belarusian regime-change activist Roman Protasevich, whose arrest on a grounded plane caused a global scandal, joined Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and was cultivated by the US government’s media apparatus.
by Ben Norton
Part 2 - Western government-backed color revolution seeks regime change in Belarus
Roman Protasevich is among the most high-profile Belarusian opposition figures to be cultivated by Western governments in a regime-change operation targeting their home country.
In 2020, a protest movement in Belarus quickly morphed into a Western-backed attempt at a so-called color revolution. It aimed at overthrowing the government of President Alexander Lukashenko, a former Soviet collective farm director who has ruled Belarus since 1994 and maintained some Soviet-style policies, while pursuing friendly relations with Russia and China.
To the chagrin of the US and its EU allies, Lukashenko has overseen a relatively state-led economy with greater public ownership and more robust social programs when compared to his post-Soviet neighbors, which imposed neoliberal shock therapy and integrated their political and economic systems into NATO and Western financial markets.
While imposing suffocating economic sanctions on Belarus, the US government and European Union member states have poured millions of dollars into anti-Lukashenko groups, particularly media outlets, while helping to establish a parallel government in exile, called the Coordination Council, led by NATO-backed opposition figure Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.
A pair of Russian pranksters posing as Tsikhanouskaya tricked top officials from the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA front that funds opposition groups in countries targeted by Washington for regime change, into admitting that they had trained and funded the leaders of the attempted Belarusian color revolution.
“A lot of the the people who have been trained by these [NED] hubs, who have been in touch with them, and being educated, being involved in their work, have now taken the the flag and started to lead in community organizing,” stated NED Senior Europe Program Officer Nina Ognianova, who previously served as the Eurasia program coordinator at regime-change lobby group the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
“We don’t think that this movement that is so impressive and so inspiring now came out of nowhere, that it just happened overnight. But it has been developing, and we have our modest but significant contribution in that by empowering the local actors to do the important work,” Ognianova openly told the Russian pranksters, known as Vovan and Lexus.
Also on the prank call was Carl Gershman, the decades-long president of the NED, and a former activist on the American anti-communist, social-democratic left who later became a Reagan-era neoconservative and has led the CIA front since 1984.
Thinking he was speaking with Tsikhanouskaya – the Belarusian version of Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó – Gershman outlined the extensive support the US government’s regime-change arm has provided to the Belarusian opposition, and particularly its media apparatus:
We have four institutes, and I think all of them are active in Belarus. Two of them I think you know well, because they work very, very closely with you and your team and the Coordination Council, and that’s NDI [National Democratic Institute] and IRI [International Republican Institute], our two party institutes.
And they’re under the NED umbrella, and we fund their work, you know, that works on strengthening parties and their messaging, their public outreach, their communications. And I know that they’re working with you [Tsikhanouskaya] and your team very, very closely.
And we also have a business institute that’s associated with our Chamber of Commerce in the United States, the Center for International Private Enterprise, that we have funded to work with the private sector in Belarus, to set a vision and a framework for a post-Lukashenko private economic recovery of the country.
And we have a labor institute, a trade union institute association … and in addition to these four institutes, and our labor institute, which supports the independent unions in Belarus, we also make grants directly to organizations in Belarus, and have done so for a very, very long time.
And the critical area here, first of all, is free media. We support the journalists … We support people if they have to flee the country, we support their temporary stay in other countries, and all the needs that they have.
We have been working around the country, in the eastern part of the country … on civic participation, and we’ve made grants to groups. We also have worked in the western part of the country on free media … where we’ve supported citizen journalism.
And they’re under the NED umbrella, and we fund their work, you know, that works on strengthening parties and their messaging, their public outreach, their communications. And I know that they’re working with you [Tsikhanouskaya] and your team very, very closely.
And we also have a business institute that’s associated with our Chamber of Commerce in the United States, the Center for International Private Enterprise, that we have funded to work with the private sector in Belarus, to set a vision and a framework for a post-Lukashenko private economic recovery of the country.
And we have a labor institute, a trade union institute association … and in addition to these four institutes, and our labor institute, which supports the independent unions in Belarus, we also make grants directly to organizations in Belarus, and have done so for a very, very long time.
And the critical area here, first of all, is free media. We support the journalists … We support people if they have to flee the country, we support their temporary stay in other countries, and all the needs that they have.
We have been working around the country, in the eastern part of the country … on civic participation, and we’ve made grants to groups. We also have worked in the western part of the country on free media … where we’ve supported citizen journalism.
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