Conflict Zones

DR_Belarus-9 Aug-Four years later cover
Conflict Zones

Lukashenka’s Cemented Dictatorship in Belarus: Four Years Since August 2020

9 August 2024
Four years have passed since the rigged 9 August 2020 presidential election in Belarus. Ordinary people are labelled traitors and extremists while Moscow is taking over more of Belarus’s sovereignty. In the past few weeks, minor positive signals have come out of Minsk but they are largely cosmetic. A dozen Belarus political prisoners were released on pardon, while five Ukrainian citizens and one German citizen in Belarusian prisons were exchanged. Belarus intro-duced a visa-free regime for EU citizens which was lauded by state propaganda as an unprecedented, gracious sign of the country’s ‘openness’. Meanwhile, some EU Member States advise against travelling to Belarus due to the high risk of fabricated criminal prosecution by the Belarus authorities. Tension on the Belarus-Ukraine border somewhat decreased

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DR_2024-08-07_CSCIS
Information Warfare

How Russian Special Information Operations Try to Undermine Mobilisation in Ukraine

7 August 2024
EUvsDiSiNFO opens its columns to the Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communication and In-formation Security. The purpose of the CSCIS is to strengthen national resilience and combat information and disinformation threats in collaboration with public institutions, civil society organisations and international partners. The Kremlin’s informa-tion manipulation operations with disinformation targeting mobilisation with disinformation to undermine public trust in Ukrainian authorities. Manipu-lative antimobilisation messages spread on TikTok and Telegram often include a kernel of truth to give more credence to the Kremlin’s lies. Since the begin-ning of Russian hybrid aggres-sion against Ukraine in 2014, Russian state security services have targeted Ukrainian mobili-sation. Moscow has launched disinformation operations plan-ting messages in the Ukrainian information space to undermine trust in the country’s military political leadership.

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Staline
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De-Stalinization and de-Putinization

12 February 2024
After so many hopes had been raised in Russian protest circles and in the West with candidate Boris Nadezhdin, despite his program which raised many questions, the hammer fell: the Russian Electoral Commission did not validate his candidacy on the pretext of a few thousand invalid signatures. But the emergence of a candidate, even if he has been rejected, who advocates an end to the war and a new rapprochement with Europe, is symptomatic. Historian Françoise Thom sees a sign of the end of Putin’s rule and a post-Putin era… Stalin starved Ukraine in 1933 while obliterating the Ukrainian intelligentsia; after the war, he waged a merciless war on Ukrainian resistance fighters, most of whom came from annexed areas.

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Général Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim
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Where is the Will of the West?

4 January 2024
Under Putin, the process of merging power with organized crime was completed. At the same time, the pace of expansionist dynamics has accelerated, under the camouflage of an ideological messianism. Russia is a state in appearance only. In reality, it is an aggregate of criminal gangs revolving around an all-powerful godfather. This mafia-like structure of Russian power has merged organically with imperial practice: for Putin, the main thing is to control the elites of target countries, just as a godfather, the capo di tutti capi, supervises his henchmen. Hence his obsession with “color revolutions”, which make him lose face by dethroning his satraps. To regard Putin’s regime as “nationalist” is to seriously misread the situation.

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