"We Live In A Time Of Change."
- 20.10.2025, 16:07
The regime has run out of money.
Former political prisoner, blogger Dmitry Kozlov "Gray Cat" in an interview with "Ordinary Morning" told what helps him stay optimistic. The Charter97.org reports a snippet of the conversation:
- We live in a good time, a time of big changes, big decisions. Crises, as some people say, are always times of opportunity. We are now living in a time of opportunity, a time when big changes can come to the country. Look at what is happening. Do you think Lukashenko released political prisoners out of some kindness of heart? Or because he stopped feeling threatened by them? No. It was the economy that got him in trouble in the first place. There's no money. And he's trying to make some kind of deal to loosen the screws a little bit. Talk about "sanctions don't work." Sanctions are working just fine. And the fact that they worked is what got us here. How many years did he put up with it? He didn't want to release anyone.
They started releasing people in August 2024, after the amnesty. 20-30 people who wrote a petition for pardon. None of the status, famous people.
Now Lukashenko has decided to take advantage of the weakness and fragmentation of the West and just to get all the sanctions lifted in exchange for releasing some 200-300 people. It is necessary to build the whole system of relations and interaction with him so that it would not be possible, so to speak, to "blunder". Because he has released 50 people, he'll release another 50, lift sanctions, let's say, against Belaruskali, and then he won't release anyone else. He will say: I don't need more, I've had enough, now I can more or less connect debit and credit, let the rest sit until the end and rot.
It's still necessary to somehow, negotiating with him, to solve the issue of a complete suspension of repression, the possibility of returning people to their homeland and guarantees of security or the possibility of choice. Otherwise, they just threw out a few people on some obscure lists. And then what? And they put a hundred new people in jail on top of that. It's fine, even one person who was released is fine, because it's a person's fate, it's not numbers on paper, but I don't want to be selfish. We're not selfish, we want everybody to experience it, we want everybody to get out. So we don't have to limit ourselves to 50 people. Thousands of others, two or three thousand unknowns who are not on the lists - will they stay there forever? Are they going to be given more time?