This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Bachelors.

This is CBS Eye on the World. I'm John Bachelors. Bellerus in the summer of 2020 during the

depths of the pandemic, living in Manhattan on East 44th Street, just as the cafes opened

again to put their tables out on the sidewalk so you could sit with a cappuccino. On a beautiful

August day, I was reading the news internationally and suddenly there was noise, which was unusual

because there weren't many people in Manhattan those days and shops were closed intermittently.

Grand Central was largely empty, but there was loud street noise, marching sounds or chanting

sounds. I didn't recognize. And suddenly I was overwhelmed. People pushing past me on

the sidewalk, I was in the way sitting in the sidewalk with the table and a cappuccino.

Waring red, my memory is red t-shirts all with language pointing to Bellerus. There were

large flags I didn't recognize. Bellerusian flags. There were women with baby strollers,

big, square-shouldered men, big, square-shouldered women, lots of blonde hair. These were the

Bellerus in diaspora, in New York. Why were they coming to East 44th Street? I learned

that across the street on an upper floor of a building was the legation for Bellerus

in New York. They were coming to protest the results of what we now regard as a corrupt

vote. That summer, returning a man named Lukashenko to be the apparatchik dictator, boss

of Bellerus one more time. I learned from Ekaterina Zalotova that what I was witnessing

that day marks a change in the posture between Minsk, the capital of Bellerus, on the Polish

border, the frontier of NATO, the relationship changed between Minsk and Moscow. There to

four, there had been some standoffishness, some distance between Lukashenko and Putin. After

that, no more. Ekaterina, a very good day to you, in geopolitical futures. You identify

those moments as when Bellerus needed money help, it needed support, it needed cultural

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