This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Batchett with Professor H.J. McHenner in

International Relations. Lukashenko, the dictator of 10 million people in Belarus, has been in the

news since the said-to-be false election of 2020 during the first summer of the pandemic,

protested by the Belarusian diaspora around the world since then, an iron grip on state security

in Belarus. At the same time, Lukashenko has been a reliable, obedient lieutenant of Vladimir Putin

in Moscow, spending a deal of time there consulting at the Kremlin. Now we're told, and none of this

is confirmed, but we're told. Vladimir Putin has vowed safety deployment of tactical nuclear weapons

to Belarus. In an interview for what I presume to be Russian TV, the young correspondent holding the

mic to Lukashenko without a tie in a white shirt and a jacket, he's a portally man.

Yes indeed. He's quite well, the word would be bloated if I knew better. However-

Yes exactly, don't say that. He appears to be a perfect duplicate for what Hollywood would cast

as a commissar during the Soviet Union. And he speaks vulgarly and in great, at great speed,

and boasts about what he knows and what he doesn't know, about nuclear weapons. He talked about them

as if they were a burden of chocolate. Well, we're going to deploy them. They're going to be here

and there and everywhere. He told the Russian audience the correspondent holding the microphone to him,

smiled at one point. So I presume that his Russian is quite ordinary. He has an off-handed

way of making things seem used- I think it's Russian, maybe. And after watching the interview in

Russian, I couldn't understand it. There was no transcript provided. I got the sense that this is a

grand fatherly figure and that the people of Belarus have no reason to either fear him or

respect him. Now, Professor, I turn over Belarus to you because my first occasion to dealing with

this was two summers ago. When there was news that Belarus was flying refugees from Baghdad

to Minsk and then driving them to the border with Lithuania and saying, walk that way and you get to

...