"Nothing Is Working For Lukashenko Anymore"
- 17.07.2026, 11:46
The economy has completely turned around.
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Analyst Sergei Chaly appeared on “ChestnOK-LIVE” program about how Lukashenko has spent his 30 years in power.
“Does Lukashenko have any good options?” Sergey Chaly wonders. — But for him, nothing is working at all anymore. The economy has completely collapsed.
Officials constantly say: we’re an open economy. But there’s a wall with the West! Belarus’s economy used to work like this: we buy raw materials from Russia, process them, and sell them to the West.
And now, at a recent forum in Russia, they were boasting, saying, “Look how our foreign trade balance with Russia has evened out: it used to be sharply negative, but now it’s zero.”
But why was it negative before? Because we had a huge trade surplus with Europe. We used to buy energy resources from Russia and sell value-added goods to the West.
Now we’re selling everything to Russia at completely different prices—and that’s why the balance has evened out. In other words, there’s nothing good about this; it’s nothing to brag about. Our “multi-vector” approach has turned into a “single-vector” one, and our dependence is total.Lukashenko’s problem, according to Chaly, is that he is unable to think long-term:
— Look at Poland today. Remember, 10–15 years ago, Warsaw looked worse than Minsk. I remember the days when goods were transported from Belarus to Poland to be sold at markets, not the other way around.
But they gradually developed; there wasn’t a single year—with the exception of the COVID year—when their economy wasn’t in the black.
And now, within a single generation, Poland has found itself on the verge of becoming the world’s tenth-largest economy. Lukashenko had the same amount of time. And his starting position was even better.
But now he’s in an even tougher situation. He realizes his days are numbered; he’s frail and no longer chops firewood. The last time firewood was mentioned, his press office posted a photo of neatly stacked firewood—see, Lukashenko chopped that himself.
He had 30 years, but he blew all that money on subsidies. And now, in this situation, he’s adopting the mindset of a gambler who wants to make a big bet at the casino in the hope of winning it all back.