Tribune. It is impossible to dissociate the organization of the Euro football, which will take place from June 11 to July 11, from the international climate of tensions, threats and provocations that the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has once again aggravated by his gangster practices.
By hijacking a civilian airliner under the threat of a Mig-29 to kidnap and imprison the dissident journalist Roman Protassevich and his companion Sofia Sapega, he, with the complicity of his godfather Vladimir Poutine, increased the repression a notch cross-border.
State terrorism
This is an act of piracy within Europe itself against a European company followed by a double kidnapping.
However, everyone knows that the autocrat Putin is today in the maneuver to keep Lukashenko at the head of Belarus: he endorsed the massive electoral fraud of his re-election, denounced by the democratic opposition and defense organizations. rights, it supports the violent repression of demonstrations by the police and militias under orders and it activates its spy networks to track down, in defiance of international law, political opponents and silence them, including by state terrorism. There he is only exporting the methods that have kept him in power in Russia for more than twenty years and which are intended to perpetuate his national-populist rule until at least 2036.
His nationalist ambition of ideological and military reconquest of the former satellites of the Soviet glacis was accomplished by a series of coups which openly violated international law (invasion of Georgia, annexation of Crimea) and by annihilation of all forms of violence. internal opposition (assassinations of journalists, imprisonment of dissidents in re-education camps, bringing NGOs and independent press organs to heel, systematic police violence against demonstrators).
Putin and his henchman Lukashenko not only violate the sovereignty of the European Union but they also pose a direct threat to peace in Europe. By persecuting the democratic opposition within their borders and by tracking down dissidents exiled in the countries of the European Union, they constitute serious factors of destabilization.
Shameful deposit
For Euro 2021, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) has chosen eleven host cities: Rome, London, Amsterdam, Seville, Bucharest, Copenhagen, Glasgow, Munich, Budapest, Baku and Saint Petersburg. Seven matches including a quarter-final are to take place at Gazprom Arena in Saint Petersburg.
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