Journalists at the Belarusian State Channels started a strike on 17 August. Alyaksandr Lukashenka reacted with almost immediately firing everybody and requesting Russia to send “shtreykbrekhers“, strike-breakers, to Belarus. 21 August, the official Belarusian news wire quotes Lukashenka [the self-proclaimed president-elect, – Ed],
“I asked the Russians – “send us 2–3 teams of journalists, just in case”.
EUvsDisinfo gets in contact with one of the striking journalists, currently in hiding and requesting to be quoted anonymously,
In an interview with RT.com Alyaksandr Lukashenka expresses his gratitude to the Moscow strike-breakers, “You understand how important you are for us in these troubled times; how your technical personnel worked, your journalists, reporters, your bosses. That was very valuable,” Lukashenka says. The striking journalist confirms RT’s role in propping up the Lukashenko system, RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, was one of the Russian journalists, invited for an interview with Alyaksandr Lukashenka. She has earlier suggested sending “polite men” to Belarus to ensure order in the country, hinting on the Russian soldiers deployed to Crimea before the illegal annexation in 2014, and seems content with allowing RT journalists to act as “polite men.” Lukashenka has employed not only foreign strike-breakers, but the RT-staffed Belarusian state TV also showed recently a participant in a pro-Lukashenka demo in Minsk expressing passionately his support for Alyaksandr Lukashenka, Those people [the opposition] are manipulated by the Western news services. They are for everything good and against everything bad. But its only hot air, nonsense. If you look deeper into what’s going on at their meetings and ask what they really want, they say – “we don’t know, we came here because we are for love and peace. Lukashenko has given us freedom, more freedom than anywhere in the world. And they want more freedom? They don’t even know what they are talking about. A nice sound bite for a story on how Belarusians demonstrate against foreign interference. The only issue is that the participant is a Russian citizen. A foreigner interfering in internal Belarusian affairs. Belarusian opposition web channel Reform.by has identified the man as Anton Tarasov, a young politician, and video blogger, member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Russian reporters pretending to be Belarusian, interview Russians politicians, pretending to be Belarusian citizens protesting against foreign interference in Belarus… RT’s tag-line is “Question More”. In Belarus, RT is making sure no questions at all are asked. The ongoing Belarusian protests were triggered by the official results of the 9 August presidential elections that claimed that incumbent President Alyaksandr Lukashenka would win by a landslide widespread reports of vote-rigging. People take to the streets for more than a month now despite polite beatings and mass arrests. Read also:
“One can easily see that foreigners are working on state TV. For instance – our country is called “Belarus”. This is the name used also in the Russian language here in our country. But now you see the word “Belorussiya”, which is only used in Russia, never in Belarus.”
