br23 blog - minsk, belarus

Two Czech senators Karel Schwarzenberg and Jaromir Stetina were denied entry visas to Belarus where they planned to meet representatives of the political opposition and, specifically, united opposition candidate Alexander Milinkevich. Belarus embassy in Prague declined to comment.
So far, only Belarusian svaboda.org and Czech Ceske Noviny reported about it.

This is unofficial data as of today, according to the headquarters of the respective presidential potentials:
1. Alexander Lukashenka — 930,000 people (sounds like awfully a lot, almost unreal, more than 17% of all voters, and especially considering the fact that there are not so many collectors for Lukashenka, and people often slam the door when […]

This happened several months ago at Minsk-2 international airport. Minsk mayor M.Paulau together with our Russian Orthodox (sic!) clergymen baptized an Austrian Airlines airplane Fokker-100, dubbing it “Minsk”.
I saw the news report on the state TV, and it was bizarre, like watching a tribal ritual, Orthdox clergy being the savages. A black-clothed priest was walking […]

For anyone who still believes in “good old Europe” that could help to establish freedom and democracy in Belarus, here’s yet another typical quote.
Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht speaking today in Brussels about the OSCE preparations for the March elections in Belarus (Belgium is the OSCE chairman in 2006, and this is their level […]

Invited by the French government, our main opposition candidate Alexander Milinkevich visited Paris and met with the French Minister of foreign affairs. During the visit he gave a few interviews, including a TV interview for Euronews. Right now on their website there’s a big banner on the very top of the front page, advertising the […]

For all the NHL and hockey fans in my audience:
The biggest success of Belarus ice hockey national team came in Salt Lake City at the Olympic Games (2002) when they beat Sweden 4:3 in quater final and reached semis. The game was pretty tough, and the score was tied at 3:3 just two and a […]

In addition to Alexander Lukashenka, the main opposition candidate Alexander Milinkevich, and a puppet pro-Lukashenka “oppositioner” Sergey Gajdukevich, there are several other potentials.
I talked with one of them on the phone two days ago, namely, with Alexander Vajtovich (or Voytovich). He’s a distinguished physicist who was a President of the Academy of Sciences for several […]

It seems Russians screwed up yet again. They are going to sell gas to themselves for $230, while Ukraine is going to get it for $95 per 1000 cubic meters. That obscure Austrian-Russian intermediate company is created by “Gazprom” just to safe face. It’s funny to observe the Russian blogosphere and see how many Nazi […]

Google.by is owned by unknown cybersquatters (as it appears, they are most probably related to a Minsk web studio ActiveMedia). I first wrote about it in July 2003 [1]. At first, they had a graphical interface totally different from Google and their own database, which appeared to be just a tiny index of several thousand […]

My blog is currently ranked as #1 result on Google and MSN for the search phrase “ukraine russia gas war”, which is nice, though I must confess I’m not such a credible source of information on that. Of course, I follow the news just like everybody else, but I don’t have any insider’s information.
As of […]