I hope that the normalization of relations between our countries will continue under your leadership.”. The first democratic Belarusian presidential elections were held on 23 June and 10 July 1994.

Ukraine would be brought in, too. In August 2019, Lord Timothy Bell died in London at the age of 77.

For a million pounds sterling ($1.3 million) per year, for example, Bell Pottinger said it could replace Google’s top search results for “human rights violations in Uzbekistan” with hyperlinks to glowing reports about the country, written by the firm’s own staff. According to Lukashenko, the two leaders talked about ways to connect to Russia. Goldfarb says Bell argued that incremental steps were needed to convince potential Western partners that any reforms were part of a long-term plan. “Their work had no discernible impact on the image of the regime.

Minsk, May 8, 1998, Lukashenko and his son, Nikolai, cast a ballot in Belarus’s parliamentary elections, Minsk, September 28, 2008, Vasily Fedosenko / Reuters / Scanpix / LETA, Lukashenko and his son, Nikolai, meet Pope Benedict XVI during an official visit to the Vatican on April 27, 2009, Chris Helgren / Pool / AFP / Scanpix / LETA. Currently, the unemployment rate is at 0.9%, although the other figures are relatively high. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. Of course, it was almost impossible to get positive coverage about Belarus because it’s a nasty dictatorship. Subsequently, he assumed office on 20 July 1994 for the first presidential term. Bell’s people didn’t stop there, either. Later that year their oldest son Viktor was born. That’s how he got all these big contracts with foreign governments.

In an exchange secretly recorded on camera, Bell Pottinger executives bragged that they could quickly arrange at a client’s request for then UK Prime Minister David Cameron to telephone the head of the Chinese government with a request to support any particular business project. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. Viktor Lukashenko (a diplomat and the president’s eldest son) and Vladimir Makei (then Lukashenko’s chief of staff and now the Belarusian foreign minister) allegedly led the pro-Western faction. Timothy Bell told Richard Poplak: “Boris got very close to the contract... to get the copper supplied and it was hundreds of millions that he would have.”. The company’s operations were somewhat unorthodox and focused less on traditional advertising than “reputation services” — in other words, Bell helped launder the public images of clients in need of a fresh start. Following a win in the 1994 presidential elections, Lukashenko announced a referendum which asked questions on national symbol, Russian language, and Belarus-Russia ties. As the investigations couldn’t come to an evidence-supported conclusion, Lukashenko had to resign from the office. id: "96220e5d-b43a-44f2-bae8-6cba7e69115c", However, according to a wide-spread version, his mother is Irina Abelskaya [pl], a former personal physician of Alexander Lukashenko. Roughly a decade ago, when a conflict over tariffs on Russian energy products strained the relationship between Alexander Lukashenko and Vladimir Putin to the breaking point, the Belarusian president started thinking seriously about repairing his standing in the West. Story by Alexey Kovalev, edited by Tatyana Lysova, Lord Timothy Bell and Margaret Thatcher in London on September 17, 2002, Alan Davidson / Shutterstock / Vida Press, An excerpt from the special supplement on Belarus released by “The Financial Times” on November 18, 2008, Alexander Litvinenko not long before his death from polonium poisoning, London, November 2006, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko meets Boris Berezovsky, then the executive secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States. sector and Bell Pottinger helped put me in touch with the right people and the officials responsible for this industry,” a British journalist who asked not to be named told Meduza. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. Little has been written about the events that entangled the dictator in Minsk and the spin-doctors of London, and most participants are reluctant to discuss this history even now, 12 years later.
The PR firm’s managers also claimed to have direct access to several other senior British officials. ", "Meet Kolya Lukashenko, A Nine-Year-Old Dictator In Training", Николай Лукашенко — сын президента Белоруссии, друг Владимира Путина и талантливый музыкант, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nikolai_Lukashenko&oldid=982565811, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 8 October 2020, at 23:06. Alexander Lukashenko married Galina Zhelnerovich in 1975. The company’s political desk, for example, was tasked with changing the country’s image as “Europe’s last dictatorship” and improving its overwhelmingly negative portrayal in the international media. These cookies do not store any personal information. The firm’s political strategists also worked with Belarusian officials to overcome international isolation, lift foreign sanctions, and establish ties to organizations like the IMF and World Bank, which could conceivably have helped the country manage the loss of trade with Russia. [1][3] Alexander Lukashenko remains formally married to his wife Galina Lukashenko, although the couple are believed to be separated. Besides, Lukashenko also has an illegitimate son named Nikolai who is supposedly his successor. But that’s the way he operated.”, An unnamed third party helped facilitate the business between Bell Pottinger and the Belarusian government. var qs = Object.keys(params).reduce(function(a,k){a.push(k+'='+encodeURIComponent(params[k]));return a},[]).join(String.fromCharCode(38));

For example, in November 2008, The Financial Times released a special supplement designed to attract more foreign investment to Belarus (the publication was timed to coincide with the Belarusian Investment Forum, which took place in late November that year).

“He would overpromise and overcharge, and then he would trade on his past relationship with Margaret Thatcher whom, I suspect, Lukashenko worshipped. In 2011, the British newspaper The Independent published a report by undercover journalists from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism who met with the firm’s managers, posing as Uzbekistani state officials.

The same month, the European Union announced a travel ban against Lukashenko and his political aides. “My impression at the time was that did not really know what they were doing,” Gould-Davies said. cb: (new Date()).getTime() d.getElementById("contentad393218").appendChild(s);

Journalists writing about the company’s work for Minsk have alluded to this other participant. + qs; The idea for the PR campaign, Goldfarb says, was entirely Berezovsky’s. It’s unfair. Alexander Lukashenko took hold of his throne again in 2015. Что мы знаем о сыне президента, принце Беларуси также он носит титул «КрашВсеяРуси», Младшему сыну президента — 15 лет. Prior to entering the mainstream political career, Alexander Lukashenko ventured into different positions. The couple had two children together. [6][7][8], Lukashenko appeared in public for the first time in 2008. Other staff at Bell Pottinger worked with leading business publications to depict Belarus as more attractive to foreign investors. Despite such protests, the elections went ahead and Lukashenko had a landslide victory again.
s.src = p + "://api.content-ad.net/Scripts/widget2.aspx?" The polls showed Lukashenko as a favorite of around 84% voters. And Batka at the time, according to Mr. Berezovsky, was incensed. Some of this money came from Lord Bell, he claimed, and Berezovsky apparently never paid back the last million pounds sterling (almost $1.3 million) of the loan. Opposition protests ended in mass arrests and attacks against Lukashenko’s rivals in the race and their supporters. This image, which has now traveled the world and become one of the most notorious symbols of the Putin regime’s savagery, was commissioned by the Bell Pottinger agency.