"The Main Question Is What Will Happen After Lukashenko Leaves Office"
- 3.08.2025, 19:39
Why the dictator's health information is a mystery.
Recently, Alexander Lukashenko has been demonstratively isolated from the cameras and the public. He is shown only from afar, avoiding close-ups, and at meetings he is seated far away, at absurdly long tables. Rumors of his deteriorating health and growing inadequacy are becoming more frequent.
Is Lukashenko repeating the path of Soviet general secretaries, who live out their last months in the shadows? Charter97.org talked with political columnist Dmitry Bolkunts about it:
- It is clear that human age is limited. Or rather, the term of stay on Earth is limited by certain parameters - nature, medical help, some other possibilities. Therefore, Lukashenko will not be an exception. Maybe he thinks that he will rule forever, but it will not happen. Soviet general secretaries thought the same way: Brezhnev thought, thought - and eventually died. Others died. Stalin died. Everyone died. And Lukashenko will not be an exception.
Of course, the best option for him is to die in office. I heard one hypothesis a few months ago: why he tricked Putin into running in the January 2025 elections. Allegedly he persuaded Putin to stay on for one more term so that he himself could die in office. He apparently wanted it that way. I don't know whether it's true or not, but this version was heard.
The fact that he is now being shown in a bad light is probably not accidental. Apparently, there are reasons to hide his condition. I should note, though: he's tightened up a bit in the last year and a half - not like in 2023, when he could barely move. Back then, he was even carried out on a stretcher and given a special car. I assume the medics are actively monitoring him, putting him on pills. But that's not the point. What is important is another thing: for a long time - both in Russia and in Western analytical centers, including the United States, and in China as an eastern vector - the question has been discussed not when Lukashenko will leave (in a month, a year, five years), but what will happen after him, after his death.
The main question is what will happen after Lukashenko leaves life. How will Belarus develop, who will lead the country, what processes will begin? Today's moment is a kind of pause. Everyone is just waiting for an event that could lead to changes. It was approximately the same in the Soviet period and in other countries that were under Moscow's influence - Bulgaria, Romania, Poland.