Continued Protests in Belarus – week 4

Another 100,000+ people protesting in Minsk. This is the third Sunday in a row with over 100,000 protestors. Again, not sure how Lukashenko rides this one out, although this does appear to be his plan. He does not have a lot of other good options. I suspect if he seriously cracks down he will probably be overthrown, and I gather he understands that. If he called Russia for aid, then they may never leave. If things get too disorderly, Russia may use that as an excuse to intervene. So, it appears that he is just trying to hang on and hope that this somehow wears itself out. As we saw with the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, this is probably a vain hope. They went on for 3 months, under sniper fire and in the middle of winter.

Anyhow, watching and waiting. These are the types of events that make people like Putin and Xi Jinping nervous, and they do have reason to be in the age of coronavirus and declining economies.

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.

Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.

His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) and The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019)

Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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