‘Things will get worse for us in Russia’: Russian Communist leader warns of consequences if Lukashenko is overthrown

If the Belarusian political crisis ends with the overthrow of President Alexander Lukashenko, Russia will face serious consequences. That's according to the leader of Russia's Communists, the country's largest opposition party.

“If they break Belarus, things will get worse for us in Russia,” said Gennady Zyuganov, at a video conference of the Union of Communist Parties, a group which brings together communists from countries which used to be a part of the Soviet Union.

Zyuganov has been the leader of the Communist Party since 1993 and has run for Russian president four times. In the Soviet Union, he was a leading critic of leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost. Nowadays, he is known for focusing on issues such as increases to pensions and re-nationalization of companies privatized in the 1990s.

According to Zyuganov, Belarus’ most prominent opposition figure, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, has no concrete proposals or plan for what to do, “neither in the economy, nor in politics, nor in other sectors.”

The Communist leader had previously written on Twitter that the protests in Belarus, which he compared the Ukrainian demonstrations in 2013-2014, were a “step toward the destruction of Russia.”

Zyuganov's assessment was also shared by Alexey Sokol, the party's first secretary (of Belarus), who claimed that the protesters were “confused.”

Anti-Lukashenko protesters have been taking to the streets daily since August 9, when the country announced the official election result as more than 80 percent for the incumbent president. The result is widely thought to have been falsified, enraging opposition Belarusians. The demonstrations, which have been met with strong force from the country's security services, have seen thousands of people arrested.

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