DISINFO: Eastern Partnership one of the main channels for destabilising the situation in Belarus
SUMMARY
Representatives of Belarus will not take part in the Eastern Partnership summit to be held in December. Cooperation in the Eastern Partnership will be limited only to working contacts.
The Eastern Partnership has become one of the main channels for destabilising the situation in Belarus.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives about Belarusian protests and the Eastern Partnership.
The Eastern Partnership (EaP) is a joint policy initiative which aims to deepen and strengthen relations between the European Union (EU), its Member States and its six Eastern neighbours: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.
It is a mutually beneficial and constructive platform for countries in the region to build a closer relationship with the EU if they choose to do so. Within this framework, guiding the EU's relations with its neighbours is the EU’s Global Strategy and the European Neighbourhood Policy, which calls for the need to focus on increasing the stabilisation and resilience of the EU's Eastern neighbours. The Eastern Partnership stands for good neighbourly relations and respects the individual aspirations and ambitions of each partner country.
On 28 June 2021, the Belarus' regime took a decision to suspend its participation in the Eastern Partnership activities; a step which met broad criticism.
The accusations that the Eastern Partnership is used to destabilise Belarus are groundless. The Belarusian protests and political crisis in Belarus resulted instead from large-scale public discontent concerning election fraud in 2020 and subsequent police violence towards peaceful protest participants across Belarus. According to statistical data and independent observers, the official result of the presidential elections was heavily falsified. A joint monitoring effort by three NGOs demonstrates the scale of falsification based on election protocols from 1,310 polling stations across Belarus and concludes that the announced result (80% of votes cast for Lukashenka) is mathematically "impossible" (p. 7).
See earlier disinformation cases claiming that the aim of the Eastern Partnership is to separate Russia from its neighbours, that the Eastern Partnership and the Three Seas Initiative are anti-Russian, that the Eastern Partnership is an instrument of energy colonialism, that the Eastern Partnership is about external control and disintegration or that Eastern Partnership, the tool of Russophobes in the big game against the East, failed in Belarus.