#Віталь Шышоў

[tomorrowusa]

Belarus dictator Aleksander Lukashenko is doing his best to turn his country into the European equivalent of North Korea.

The Putin ally has remained in power since 1994 through rigged elections and repression of dissent. And when Belorussians protested en masse after the 2020 rigged election he doubled down on authoritarianism and even went so far as to prosecute people who were wearing socks which somewhat looked like the opposition flag.

In recent months Lukashenko has been extending his repressive reach beyond the borders of Belarus. Two high profile incidents in two days have focused attention on this. 

On Tuesday, the body of Vitaly Shishov, who ran an organization helping Belarusians flee persecution, was found hanged in a park in Kyiv, where he had been living since leaving Belarus last year. Shishov was reported missing by his partner after he didn’t return from a jog the day before. Police are investigating the possibility that Shishov was murdered and the scene was set up to look like a suicide. A colleague of Shishov, who found the body, told the media that it had bruises suggesting Shishov had been beaten before his death. 

Kyiv is in Ukraine which is just south of Belarus. But Lukashenko has been reaching all the way to Japan.

Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, a sprinter on the country’s Olympic team, says team officials took her to the airport in Tokyo on Sunday against her will and tried to force her board a flight back to Belarus after she had criticized her coaches on social media. She was eventually escorted from the airport by Japanese police and has been granted a humanitarian visa by Poland. Tsmimanouskaya’s offending Instagram comments had been athletic rather than political in nature—she complained of being added to a relay team without her knowledge after some of her teammates didn’t pass doping tests—but as in many authoritarian countries, the line between sports and politics is thin: Lukashenko was himself the head of Belarus’ Olympic committee until earlier this year when he was replaced by his son. 

Yep, you read that right. Lukashenko himself was head of the Belarus Olympic Committee until he recently relinquished that position to a son. Imagine Trump as head of the US Olympic Committee and then letting Don Jr. inherit the position.

The comparison of Trump to Lukashenko is apt. They are both bumbling idiot blowhards who have no second thoughts about trying to rig elections and undermine democracy. If Trump had not lost last year he might have been able to turn the US into a Belarus-style personal dictatorship.