DISINFO: There is no doubt about Washington's involvement in the attempt to forcefully change the government in Belarus
SUMMARY
There is no doubt about Washington's involvement in the attempt to forcefully change the government in Belarus.
It is hard to believe that the Lithuanian intelligence community is capable of making such a decision on its own. Or even Poland. This is clearly an American hand. And eliminating presidents has been a favorite American pastime of the last two hundred years. Nothing new.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin propaganda narrative about Western attempts to organise a coup in Belarus.
No evidence of the involvement of American intelligence agencies has been presented. On 17 April 2021, Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko claimed he and his sons were the target of a US-backed assassination plot. He said "We discovered the work of obviously foreign special services, most likely the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI, I do not know which of the Americans worked there" but did not provide any evidence.
According to the FSB statement, Russian authorities detained Yuri Zenkovich, a lawyer, and Alexander Feduta, a well-known Belarusian literature scholar and political commentator. One of the two suspects in the assassination plot against Lukashenka has dual American-Belarusian citizenship. This fact does not mean, however, that US officials were involved in the alleged plot, which is tied to an online Zoom discussion from last summer. The U.S. State Department called the allegations “absolutely untrue.”
See earlier disinformation cases alleging that the Belarusian opposition, civic activists and independent journalists make kill lists for Western security bodies, that Lukashenko skipped the Eastern Partnership summit in 2019 because the West could organise his killing, that the United States is behind the protests in Belarus and that Poland and Lithuania are directly supervising the coup in Belarus.
This disinformation message appeared in the same article as one claiming that Partners practically confronted Ukraine with a fact - they must fight.