While the EU agonises about whether to boycott Belarusian potash or state-owned oil companies, there is one very easy measure that would not only be a powerful symbolic rebuke but also limit the regime’s campaign to spy on, harass, intimidate and harm the opposition outside the country’s borders. Kick out the KGB.
It is a stark statement about Alexander Lukashenko’s thuggish dictatorship that it never even pretended to reform its security apparatus after the Soviet Union was dissolved. Instead, the local branch of the USSR’s State Security Committee (KGB) simply became the Belarus KGB in a transition so seamless they scarcely even changed the logo.
Lukashenko, the former collective farm boss, even puts KGB veteran Vladimir Putin to shame in the trust he places in his spooks and the degree to which they have become a mainstay of his regime. They are powerful and well-resourced and like their Soviet predecessor they operate as both an intelligence service abroad and a political police force at home.
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