Diplomacy may yet cost Lukashenko's leadership

For a few hours on 24 June, as troops loyal to the renegade warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin marched on Moscow, the Belarusian opposition in exile believed Day X had arrived.

- Shaun Walker

That is how the democratic forces that coalesce around Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who fled Belarus in 2020 after Alexander Lukashenko rigged a presidential vote and then ruthlessly crushed massive protests, refer to the day they hope to overthrow the Moscow-backed dictator.

As the news of Prigozhin's extraordinary mutiny broke, Tsikhanouskaya convened a video call of her "transitional cabinet", half based in Vilnius and half in Warsaw, to begin implementing the plan for Day X.

"We were preparing for the storming of the Kremlin by Prigozhin's troops and [subsequently] instability inside Belarus," Tsikhanouskaya said in a telephone interview.

Her cabinet had made contact with a Belarusian regiment fighting as part of the Ukrainian army and readied a plan to activate partisan groups.