29 March 2024, Friday, 14:04
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Profession - Looter

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Profession - Looter
IRYNA KHALIP
PHOTO: NASHA NIVA

Belarusian security forces are "competing" with the Russian military.

Russian looters send parcels home. The addresses show that Russia is a big country, attacking Ukraine with all its constituent entities. So, the parcels fly from Kaliningrad to Ussuriisk and couriers run around perplexed how to get all these centners to their addressees. Clothes, electric scooters, boat motors, office chairs, dog kennels, air conditioners and video cards - nothing wouldn't go amiss with a prudent owner, everything will come in handy.

And then his wife will take tender care of him, call him a breadwinner and offer him a quarter-litre bottle of vodka. If there's someone to offer it to, of course. And if not - well, the widow will stay with her hope chest and, being the owner of a boat motor, an air-conditioner and a dog house, she will easily find a new husband. He will then also go off to war, and the kind hostess will equip him with a detailed list of what to get from the destroyed houses of the Ukrainians. Earlier these housewives used to send their good-for-nothing husbands to the grocery store with a list on a notebook page, so they would not forget or mix things up. Now they send them off to war. And the main thing is that he has time to send the parcel on the list before he becomes a " 200" one.

But a looter is not only a Russian military man who is shocked by the number of good things in the houses of Ukrainians. Everything is clear with him. He enters an abandoned or half-ruined house, sees there a lot of useful things and grabs them. He even grabs a dog kennel and takes it because he, a Russian military man, is ham-handed, and he is not able to make a birdhouse or a kennel or a village lavatory himself. So he takes anything he can see. But he is a situational marauder: he will not take anything from the neighbour's flat at home, because he may be punished in the neck and he understands it. And in our country, the looters are professional, almost certified.

At the time when the Putin looters were stealing utensils and tools from the Kyiv suburbs, their professional Belarusian colleagues were selling at a flea market a push-button telephone for 15 roubles. The phone belonged to Vitsebsk activist Barys Khamaida. Khamaida himself was serving another administrative arrest. A great asset, of course, is the old push-button phone. However, Vitsebsk policemen could not pass by the item seized during the detention, which could potentially be sold, even if it costs a penny. A penny saved is a penny gained, everyone knows that.

Last week looters from Minsk smashed up a flat of Yanina Sazanovich, administrator of the Chasteners of Belarus telegram channel. More precisely, her mother's flat. Then they posted videos to cheerful music, showing ruined parquet flooring, torn papers, overturned furniture. Six months before that, they had just as happily looted the flat of former TV presenter Katsiaryna Pytleva. They did not wreck the parquet - it was evident that they had not brought a chisel with them that day - but they destroyed the porcelain figurines of hedgehogs that the woman collects. They cut up wedding photos, broke the inner door, which was not even closed, and scattered flour and cereals all over the flat. However, everyone who has been in contact with the Belarusian law enforcers has probably become a victim of looters who got into his phone, scrolling through the correspondence, taking screenshots and photographing the mess after the search. There are thousands of such cases.

And here is the difference between the Russian military and the Belarusian law enforcers. The Russians are not paid for looting. Their job is to kill, torture, beat, rape. They get paid for this. Looting is a hobby, an occupation in their spare time. Military personnel take valuable and not-so-valuable items out of abandoned houses for pleasure. And also for the sake of using them in their own household and for pleasing their wives. Belarusian law enforcers loot in other people's houses, without any personal benefit from it (the 15 roubles from selling the telephone of Barys Khamaida are not counted). They simply get paid for it - and with bonuses, of course, if they vandalise other people's homes, equipment or lives with relish and enjoyment. Which means looting is their profession. Or at least a part-time job.

Iryna Khalip, specially for Charter97.org

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