Monday, April 19, 2021
Putin spoke to Biden on the phone
Kremlin: Assassination attempt on Lukashenko prevented
Foreign secret services are said to have planned his death – this is how the Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko describes it. The attack was apparently thwarted in Moscow. Kremlin boss Putin informed his US colleague Biden about this – and that also has to do with one of the suspects.
According to information from Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin informed his US colleague Joe Biden during a phone call about a failed assassination attempt on the ruler of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed according to the Interfax agency. One of the arrested suspects is also believed to be a US citizen. According to Lukashenko, foreign secret services are said to be behind the planned coup. Putin and Biden had spoken on the phone a good week ago.
As the Belarusian secret service KGB announced on Friday evening, the Russian secret service FSB arrested two Belarusians in Moscow, the political scientist Alexander Feduto and the lawyer Yuri Senkowitsch, who is also a US citizen. The Belarusian secret service KGB accuses the two suspects of having prepared an armed uprising.
In a video distributed by the Belarusian Presidential Office over the weekend, Lukashenko blamed foreign intelligence services, “probably the CIA and the FBI” from the USA. In a “special operation” a “group with a terrorist orientation” is said to have been smashed, which wanted to “seize power by violent means”, as the Belarusian secret services announced. They are said to have planned to kill Lukashenko and his family. The information cannot be verified independently.
Mass protests violently suppressed
The Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tichanovskaya said from her exile in Lithuania that the incidents reported by the Belarusian authorities were a “provocation of the Russian and Belarusian security forces”, in which citizens of Belarus and the USA had also been involved. The Kremlin in Moscow condemned plans to kill the neighboring country’s head of state.
Lukashenko had repeatedly stoked fear in the population and accused the opposition of planning a violent overthrow. With a view to the mass protests against him, he once said that a revolution like the one in neighboring Ukraine had been prevented. After the presidential election in August last year, which was widely considered to be falsified, hundreds of thousands of people had at times called for Lukashenko’s resignation and for new elections, but the movement has recently lost ground. One of the reasons for this was the brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrators by the security forces. Several protesters were killed and hundreds more were sentenced to long prison terms. The European Union does not recognize Lukashenko as president. But it still relies on Russia as its most important ally.
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