Mikalai Charhinets Wrote a Letter to Trump and Boasted About Purchased Diplomas
On the website of the pro-government Union of Writers of Belarus appeared an open letter from the former head of this organization, 88-year-old Mikalai Charhinets, to US President Donald Trump. In it, the Russian-speaking writer, whom Lukashenka awarded the title of "People's Writer of Belarus" in 2022, attempts to impress Trump with a Russian anecdote about "stupid Americans" and fake diplomas, specially created to satisfy the ambitions of post-Soviet glory-seekers.
Mikalai Charhinets. Photo: Ministry of Information of Belarus
The reason for Charhinets' letter to Trump was the latter's dispatch of a powerful armada of ships to the shores of Iran.
In a lengthy text, inexplicably not broken into paragraphs and presented as a single continuous "brick," making it extremely difficult to read, the retired police general shares a "bearded story" with the US President, which "has been circulating in various media for many years." To give this narrative weight in Trump's eyes, Charhinets writes that once
"gave it to Pavel Pavlovich Borodin, the State Secretary of the Union State, to read. After reading it, he gave a thumbs up and said: 'I'll give it to Zadornov, let him entertain the public!'"
The main plot of this anecdote, truly in the style of Zadornov's infamous monologues about "stupid Americans," is that the commander of the American aircraft carrier "Abraham Lincoln" allegedly in 1997 negotiated with employees of a Spanish lighthouse located on the shore, demanding that the lighthouse yield to him, and could not understand why it couldn't do so. Charhinets compares Iran to that very lighthouse, against which the American armada might crash, failing to understand, due to its short-sightedness, that it is an unbreakable rock.
Charhinets concludes his letter with an excursion into his own biography:
"I was once a member of the delegation of the Republic of Belarus for participation in the work of the UN General Assembly for 12 years. I remember how the American delegation submitted the 'Belarus Democracy Act' for consideration by the General Assembly, demanding that our country be condemned. The dispatch of the armada reminded me of that story at the UN. I then had to deliver a reasoned speech, in which I demonstrated the absurdity of these accusations. As a result, most delegates supported Belarus, and the US delegation had to change course. [...]
"It is pleasant that my position in the General Assembly was approved by the majority of states and even the public of the USA and England, as evidenced by their diplomas."
To substantiate his claims, Charhinets also attaches scans of those diplomas to the text. These are curious "documents," whose mass issuance provides a livelihood for the creators of numerous "biographical institutes" with grand names. If desired, any person greedy for fame but completely uncritical of themselves or reality can receive a title like "Person of the Year" from such an "institute" simply by paying a certain sum. For this, they are issued a diploma, the value of which is exactly the cost of paper and printing.
Interestingly, the creators of one of these diplomas, supposedly issued by the "American Biographical Institute," were even too lazy to format the "document" in English or even bother with any design for it.
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