Of jealousy and envy

Aleksandr Lukashenko believes that relations between Belarus and Ukraine “are not bad,” despite Kyiv’s “special” stand with regard to Minsk. “The Ukrainian leadership is taking a special stand, and the previous leadership also took this position. In order to demonstrate their own achievements, they downgraded Belarus a bit and criticized us unjustifiably,” Lukashenko told a news conference for Russian journalists, held on Nov. 10, Interfax reports. “On the one hand, it’s jealousy and on the other, envy,” the Belarusian president said, explaining the criticism from Kyiv. “We have a calm attitude to the Ukrainian leadership’s position because the Ukrainians know Belarus’s policy as well as the Russians,” he added.

Lukashenko declared that he intends to win the presidential campaign “beautifully and elegantly... Today even the opposition gives the president a 57-percent rating. Why should anyone falsify anything?” The defeat of the Belarusian government in the next presidential elections will also be a blow to Russia from which it will not recover soon. Belarus is not even Ukraine, we have a union state with Russia; we have everything in common. In Russia they know that Belarus is Russia’s last bulwark in the west, a land that has never let tanks cross it on the way to Moscow.” At the same time the president stressed that the destiny of Belarus will not be decided anywhere outside his country. “I have never promised that we will become the next gubernia; this will never happen,” he said.

The Belarusian president also announced his program for the next five years. “We will build a state for the people... Sovereignty came out of the blue, there was a credit of trust but it could melt away. We got out of such a deep pit, waded through so much horse manure. There was no time to build basic decisions into some sort of system... But we made the main decisions to save production... We did not follow the road of destruction. We took what we had and put it back on its feet and erected a normal structure of the economy on the old foundations, and it is yielding certain results... But in many respects, the decisions that we made at the time are slowing down development and excessively bureaucratizing the country... I am ashamed to look people in the eyes,” he emphasized, adding that it is essential to “clean up this field and debureaucratize the country by adapting it to people... In the next few years changes will be made to the main normative acts in order to emancipate the people.”