DISINFO: Belarus will either become part of Russia or the West's poor colony
SUMMARY
Belarus has a chance to become wealthier thanks to an accession with Russia. However, Belarusian president Alyaksandr Lukashenka is leading the country towards a Ukrainian scenario to turn it into the West’s poor colony. Belarus cannot be a really independent country. It can only join Russia as a separate federal district, in the best case, or become a US-controlled colony with pseudo-statehood, with a looted and destroyed economy. Lukashenka will likely promote Russophobic hysteria, his and his family’s fate will be bleak because Americans do not treat those who they use well. People from Lukashenka’s circle will be either imprisoned or killed, they will be replaced by nationalists and Russophobes.
RESPONSE
This is a pro-Kremlin claim consistent with recurring narratives about Belarus as an integral part of the Russian world and its bleak prospects without a close integration with Russia, Western aggressiveness and anti-Russian and anti-Belarusian activities including the West's colonial intentions, and Russophobia elsewhere including in Belarus. It promotes a false dilemma for Belarus's development and paints very bleak prospects for Belarus up to the loss of sovereignty in case it does not join Russia. See an earlier disinformation case alleging that three types of Russophobia are turning Belarus into an anti-Belarus and anti-Russian state, and other examples of a similar false dilemma claiming that Belarus faces either normal development under Russia or a forced Polonization and economic devastation, that the only possible scenario for Ukraine and Belarus to prevent their descent into Nazism through the politicisation of national clothes is to become a Russian western federal area, and that the direction of Belarus and other post-Soviet countries' political development is either a union with Russia or unavoidable degradation.