Ukrainian Media Responded To The Insanity Of Lukashenko's "hydrologist"
- 20.11.2025, 14:48
Can Pripyat be reversed.
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko held a meeting with officials on the development program of the Belarusian Polesie until 2030. The main challenge was called drought, which Lukashenko thought should be fought by turning the Pripyat riverbed in the opposite direction, because, in his fantasies, the Ukrainians allegedly do not use this river. Neither does the Dnieper, writes the Ukrainian publication ukranews.com.
"Where do these waters go? It would be good if Ukraine used the Dnieper waters in full.... These waters go to the sea. So why don't we think today that this water should be 'brought back' when and where it is needed?" reasoned Lukashenko's newly minted "hydrologist".
There are three unfortunate things standing in the way of the ambitious project:
no plan;
no money;
no source of the river.
It turns out that more or less sane ideas to combat drought have been heard from officials. Lukashenko himself said that the chairman of the Gomel Regional Executive Committee suggested returning to the topic of the Dnieper-Bug canals.
"When he made this suggestion, my eyes darkened. Because we simply don't have that much money," Lukashenko admitted.
The canal system in Polesie connects the Dnieper with the Vistula River, which flows into the Baltic Sea. According to a project to rehabilitate this waterway, called E-40, which was financially supported by the European Union, it could have carried up to 6 million tons of cargo annually. But the war in Ukraine and the rupture of economic ties between Belarus and Poland have frozen the project's realization, recalls the Ukrainian publication "Crimea.Realii".
Besides the lack of ideas and money, the cherry on the cake is geography itself. The Pripyat River originates in Ukraine - near the village of Golyadin, Kovel district, Volyn region. The right-bank tributaries flow mainly through the territory of Ukraine, the left-bank tributaries - Belarus.
The river has a well-developed hydrographic grid - about 10.5 thousand rivers and streams.
Also not a historian
Of all the seemingly endless list of professions, which, according to his own assurances, Lukashenko has mastered and which have long since become memes on the web, the path of a historian seems to have bypassed him.
The world has already seen the sad precedent of "turning the Siberian rivers around". It was a large-scale Soviet idea of the 1960s and 1980s, which envisioned partial redirection of water from the large rivers of Western Siberia southward to the arid regions of Central Asia and Kazakhstan. The rivers in question were the Ob, Irtysh, Tobol and Ishim.
The plan called for the construction of a gigantic system of canals, reservoirs and pumping stations to change the natural flow and "return" some of the northern water to the Aral Sea and the steppes. In the late 1980s, the idea was abandoned, primarily because of the enormous costs involved. The expression "turning Siberian rivers" became a phraseology meaning wastefulness and unrealistic plans.
Where do such ideas come from
The use of water as a lever of political influence is not a new idea, analyzes in his 2019 paper, Master of Political Science Taras Popov. He cites the example of the Dnieper, 80 percent of whose water comes precisely from the upper reaches of the river.
If we assume, in his opinion, that Moscovy will find an opportunity to repeat the experience of Turkey or Ethiopia in taking control of the drainage on its territory by building a dam or by other means, in theory this will lead to significant environmental and economic consequences.
Actually, such ideas were repeatedly expressed by Moscow neo-Nazi Vladimir Zhirinovsky, however, at that time there were no combat Ukrainian drones yet, and in general the world was different. According to the political analyst, Moscow has repeatedly proved its ability to implement economically unfavorable projects for the sake of political pressure. However, it would be more profitable to do it not on its own territory, but to make Belarus an ecological testing ground as well, Popov argued at that time.
"...if Moscow reaches its goal and absorbs it, it would be more expedient to implement such a project on the Belarusian territory, because in any case, significant territories should be flooded in case of the project implementation, and it is better to do it on the territory of a vassal than on its own territory".
"As one of the options for aggressive actions, in addition to or instead of blocking the Dnieper itself, the Russian Federation could build a number of smaller ones. As well as a right tributary, the Pripyat River, which originates in Ukraine but flows mostly through Belarus and joins the Dnieper on the Ukrainian-Belarusian border. Thus, Russia can deliver several small blows from different directions to Ukraine's water security," the political analyst analyzed the world of the sample of 2019.