Farewell to Sisterly Love

Let’s have a look at two inci­dents that hap­pened on the same day char­ac­ter­iz­ing the cur­rent state of rela­tions between the three coun­tries.

On Feb­ru­ary 1 Belaru­sian pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ali­axan­dr Vasiukovich was sum­moned for inter­ro­ga­tion to the Russ­ian Inves­tiga­tive Com­mit­tee in Moscow over his pho­to dis­play of Ukrain­ian sol­diers.

What is hap­pen­ing in the heads of those peo­ple in Moscow?! Belarus and Rus­sia are two dif­fer­ent coun­tries. It seems that law enforcers in Rus­sia keep for­get­ting they have no juris­dic­tion over oth­er coun­tries’ cit­i­zens and con­tin­ue to exer­cise neo-impe­ri­al­ist behav­ior, just like they did when “defend­ing Russ­ian cit­i­zens” in Krimea and Don­bass.

In anoth­er devel­op­ment, at 2.45 in the morn­ing of the same day, Feb­ru­ary 1, a Ukrain­ian jour­nal­ist Vitaly Sizov was picked up from his hotel room by Belaru­sian police, held all night in the police depart­ment, and then deport­ed from the coun­try, despite his offi­cial accred­i­ta­tion with Belaru­sian MFA.

The law enforcers jus­ti­fied their actions by say­ing that he was on some Russ­ian black­list. Since Belarus and Rus­sia have no bor­der con­trol, they share data­bas­es of peo­ple barred from trav­el­ling, so the Ukrain­ian jour­nal­ist fell vic­tim to Belarus’ friend­ship oblig­a­tion to Rus­sia.

#Belx­it is trend­ing on Twit­ter, and Rus­sians are mulling rein­tro­duc­ing prop­er con­trols on the Rus­sia-Belarus bor­der. Hope­ful­ly it will help to avoid inci­dents like this and help Rus­sians final­ly under­stand that we are dif­fer­ent coun­tries and don’t need such man­i­fes­ta­tions of their “sis­ter­ly love”.