Kris RomanBelarus president takes five-year-old ‘heir’ to military drills
Posted by Kris Roman on October 24, 2008
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko took his five-year-old son with him to the recent Fall-2008 Russia-Belarus military exercises, Radio Liberty has reported.
The Fall-2008 exercises took place earlier this month and involved around 8,500 personnel, military and special hardware, including over 40 aircraft, more than 60 tanks and around 250 armored vehicles.
Lukashenko’s son Nikolai was photographed observing the exercises and receiving reports with his father. Both of them were dressed in the uniform of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Belarus.
Lukashenko also referred to his son as his “heir” and the future president of Belarus.
Following the military exercises, Lukashenko said the Belarusian army had “risen from its knees.”
“As a general and a man who has given his whole life to the army, I am ashamed,” former Belarusian defense minister Pavel Kozlovskiy told Radio Liberty.
“I’ve visited the U.S., French, German, Moldavian armies, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” he added.
According to Lukashenko’s official biography, he has two sons, Viktor and Dmitry. The president, who lives separately from his wife, only admitted the existence of a third son last year. However, this is not the first time he has referred to Nikolai as his successor.
In April, 2007 at a press conference in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, he said that, “In the immediate future the president of Belarus will be Alexander Lukashenko. Neither my first, nor my second son will become president.”
“As for the third, I will prepare the little one. He is a unique person,” he added.
The EU recently agreed to suspend sanctions against the Belarusian leadership for six months. Forty Belarusian key political figures, including Lukashenko, had been subject to a ban on entering the EU and had had their assets frozen due to a clamp down on political dissent and other human rights violations in the country.
The U.S. earlier dubbed Lukashenko “Europe’s last dictator.”
However, relations with the West began to thaw after Belarus recently freed its remaining political prisoners and invited the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to observe September’s parliamentary elections.
