Lukashenko’s nuclear threat… (speech given at “The New Chernobyls on Europe’s Doorstep?” Conference on 29 January 2021)
The story of Belarus and nuclear power really begins in North Ukraine on the 26 of April 1986 when unit 4 of the Chornobyl nuclear plant exploded. The blast contaminated wide areas of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine and the exact number of victims whose health was compromised or who died in the aftermath of the blast may never be known. However, the National Research Centre for Radiation Medicine in Kyiv estimates that five million former Soviet citizens were affected. Plans for a nuclear reactor at Astravets in Belarus, 45 km from the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, were suspended after the accident. However, on 25 December 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart creating 15 independent ex Soviet Republics, including Belarus. An ex Red Army soldier and former Soviet farm director, Aleksandr Lukashenko, became Belarus’s first president in 1994 and has held the position to this day.
He has retained power by crushing political opposition and stifling criticism while heavily subsiding an economy that remained essentially Soviet. Death squads targeted politicians who might have threatened his rule and two of them, Yuri Zakharenko and Viktor Gonchar, were abducted and murdered in 1999. Lukashenko created the Soviet Union in miniature within Belarus and the…
