Belarus Is Approaching A Historic Crossroads

• 18.08.2026, 8:51

When can we expect the "volcanic eruption"?

In almost any situation, when predicting the future, there is a simple, obvious, and highly probable option on the table: everything will remain more or less the same. That’s often how it turns out. It is much harder to predict a turning point. And yet I will venture to suggest that Belarus is approaching a crossroads.

Exactly 35 years ago, on August 18, 1991, citizens of the USSR woke up, unaware that the country was, in the most literal sense, on the eve of a massive upheaval. It was a quiet Sunday; nothing foreshadowed that in just 24 hours the Soviet Union would find itself in a different reality, and a week later—in yet another.

Anyone who had said that the USSR would cease to exist by the end of the year would have been regarded as a madman.

Yes, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia had already declared and begun to restore their national independence. Other Soviet republics, including Belarus, had adopted declarations of sovereignty. But Moscow sought to reorganize the union on a “renewed basis.” And not only through persuasion, but also through force, which it did use at the time, albeit on a limited scale.

However, as it turned out, there were those within the Soviet leadership who believed that, for the sake of “saving the country,” it was necessary to act much more decisively. They formed the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP) and attempted to “turn back the clock.”

The paradox is that, on the contrary, the coup plotters’ actions significantly accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union. It often happens in life that the result of our actions turns out to be the opposite of what we intended.

I believe that Vladimir Putin, by starting a war against Ukraine, will ultimately achieve not the strengthening of the empire, but its collapse. The key question is: when?

If we refer to the example given above, how far away is the “new 1991”? Are we in 1990 now? Or 1980? Or 1950?

No one knows the exact answer to this question. Right now, there’s a growing, deeply subjective sense that we’re approaching crossroads that could change a great deal. But there’s not just one nuance—there are three.

1. Intuitions are often misleading. As the columnist Leonid Radzikhovsky so elegantly put it, our imagination (multiplied by desire) is like a rider who often flies over the horse’s head.

2. You can miss a fork in the road without even noticing it, continuing to move in exactly the same direction.

3. At a fork in the road, you can turn onto the path of change for the better. However, a turn for the worse is also entirely possible.

But dreaming isn’t harmful; what’s harmful is not dreaming. In my personal experience, I find historical optimism (moderate, in doses that don’t cause a hangover) to be beneficial.

Back in 1987, I couldn’t have imagined any other scenario than that my entire life would be spent in the Soviet Union under the tyranny of the CPSU. At that moment, it was absolutely impossible to imagine that in less than five years, Belarus would become independent and free. How we used that freedom is another matter…

That is precisely why it is better to believe now than not to believe. Believing in a better future helps us avoid falling into despair and stay motivated. And motivation gives us the strength to prepare so that, when a new historic opportunity arises, we can make far better use of it than we did with previous ones.

When a lull lasts long enough, it can seem as though it will last forever. But history takes its course, making up for lost time at breakneck speed.

And the conditions for this build up precisely during these lulls. A series of events over the past few months has been akin to mild underground tremors, which are sometimes followed by a volcanic eruption.

Nothing is predetermined. The contradictions that are currently escalating (primarily within Russia, to whose orbit, alas, Belarus is currently quite tightly bound) may be resolved in the future. But as things stand today, it seems to me that the next crossroads will come as early as 2026–2027.

And, to avoid having to address this twice: if Belarus maintains its current course during this period, the next major turning point will come for our homeland in 2029–2031. But the forecast in the paragraph above takes precedence.

In any case, we should prepare for the fact that, over the next five years, the situation will most likely change—and significantly so. Exactly how it changes depends on what we do (or don’t do) right now.

Old Grumbler, “Solidarnast”