In his speech broadcasted by the Russian TV channel NTV on September 2nd, the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claimed that “200 trained Ukrainian radicals are involved in the events in Belarus”. He did not specify who are these ‘radicals’, who trained them and what for, why are they there, and what makes them the ‘radicals’. These questions were neither important for him nor for the Russian audience. What was important is Lavrov's message that the unlawful forces from Ukraine are involved in the events in Belarus on the opposition side. This was the main goal of the Foreign Minister's reference to ‘radicals’ in his speech, which demonstrated the biased usage and understanding of the term by Russian officials.
Since its re-appearance in the political discourse in the early 1990s, the term ‘radical’ gradually became a buzzword that today goes hand in hand with two others: extremism and terrorism. The vague legal definition and the carefully drawn image that attaches the term ‘radical’ to violence and unlawfulness made it very convenient to refer to it while fighting the opponents of the regime. On the one hand, the lack of a precise definition rendered it possible to interpret any action or dissent as ‘radical’ by the law. This is widely used in Russia and some other authoritarian countries, where people sometimes are being sentenced to serve several years in jails even for ‘liking’ some posts on Facebook. On the other hand, the reference to it helps to create an atmosphere of fear and justify new and harsh measures of control. This, in turn, contributes to the regime's survival.
These advantages of using the term ‘radical’ in political discourse did not become obvious for the Russian political elite in the early 1990s, when radicalization was making its way to becoming a global trend.
