Window on Eurasia: Mensk’s Not Broadcasting Putin’s New Year’s Message May Have More to Do with Clocks than with Politics

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, January 2 – For the first time in two decades, Belarusian television did not broadcast the New Year’s greetings of the president of Russia, an end to what one Mensk outlet called “the absurd situation when Belarusians first were greeted by the president of an alien country” (nn.by/?c=ar&i=141556&lang=ru).

 

            But while it may be tempting to view this as the latest example of Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s efforts to distance himself from Moscow, the reason Putin’s message was not broadcast may have more to do with a change in the clocks in Belarus than with a change in the political weather there.

 

            As “Nasha Niva” reports, many Belarusians had been accustomed to marking the arrival of the New Year first “by Moscow time” at 1100 pm local time and then again “by Mensk time” at midnight, but this year, because Belarus is now again on Moscow time, the two coincided and thus broadcasters had to choose between Putin’s address and Lukashenka’s.

 

            Not surprisingly, given the control Lukashenka has over them, they unanimously chose to broadcast his speech. But as Russian outlets have pointed out, the Belarusian leader’s remarks were not that nationalistic: they were not even delivered in Belarusian but in Russian (newsru.com/world/01jan2015/belorus.html).

 

            Moreover, Belarusians were hardly deprived of Putin’s message: many of them listen to Moscow channels, and these channels carried the Kremlin leader’s words and equally important did not carry the speech of the Belarusian president.