It was reminiscent of group psychotherapy, – Sverdlov said how the CSTO summit went

At the CSTO summit they tried their best to show their closeness. / Getty Images

Vladimir Putin convened a meeting of his unsuccessful parody of NATO called the CSTO, which was held in Minsk. However, he was unable to say anything new to his allies.

The editor-in-chief of Euroradio (Belarus) Pavel Sverdlov told Channel 24 about this. As might be expected, the meeting of Moscow's allies generally did not deviate from the Kremlin's usual rhetoric.

How did the meeting of the Kremlin allies go?

In all likelihood, the most significant event of the CSTO summit was the absence of Armenia from it. Nikol Pashinyan ignored the meeting of Russia’s allies for the second time, which only emphasized the “decorativeness” of the CSTO as a structure.

“The CSTO is Russia’s answer to NATO, but in practice this answer turned out to be incapable of anything. This was shown by Azerbaijan’s attack on Armenia, when it fired at a “peacekeeping” base and took the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. At the same time, an organization allied to Armenia did nothing to protect her,” the journalist recalled recent events.

Pavel Sverdlo about the CSTO summit in Minsk: watch the video

In addition, the whole point of the meeting was a friendly hug between Lukashenko and Putin, which was supposed to testify to the strength of their relationship. In particular, reports from the event emphasized that the two dictators left the summit in the same car.

“It was reminiscent of group psychotherapy, when familiar grandfathers meet and ask each other about life. After talking a little about this, perhaps the CSTO leaders felt calmer from this. No serious statements were made public following the meeting,” Sverdlov said.

Lukashenko led to Belarus' dependence on Moscow

• Even in the first years of their presidency, Lukashenko and Putin signed an agreement on the “Union State,” which became a kind of plan for uniting the two countries into a confederation like the USSR.
• In 2019–2021, Putin began to actively put pressure on Lukashenko regarding the implementation of the provisions of the treaty. Eventually, the parties began to bring the countries' legislation closer to each other, which could potentially lead to the loss of Belarus' sovereignty.
• The situation worsened when a revolution broke out in Belarus due to fraud in the next presidential election. Then Lukashenko harshly suppressed the resistance, which is why he missed the opportunity to pursue a “multi-vector” policy and became even more dependent on Putin.
• The culmination of this connection was the Russian intervention in Ukraine from the territory of Belarus, which helped the aggressor with logistics and treatment of the wounded. However, the cooperation between the two criminal regimes did not end there, and Putin even managed to drag Lukashenko into the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.
• Now the Belarusian dictator simply does not have any “room for maneuver” left in front of Putin, to whom he still owes $10 billion for the construction of a nuclear power plant. Accordingly, Lukashenko led to the fact that both he personally and Belarus as a country found themselves in a difficult situation in front of Russia.