Belarus was home to VERY large protests last year, which were quashed not with compromise but with state force. This is not a stable government, at all. It's

Belarus was home to VERY large protests last year, which were quashed not with compromise but with state force. This is not a stable government, at all. It's less what Protasevich did per se and more that Lukashenko desperately needs to be seen as unopposable. The problem with employing crackdowns as a means to ensure stability is that you need to keep escalating so long as the opposition isn't completely crushed. We're seeing the same thing happening in Russia right now, though on a much slower fuse.