Though you may wish it were otherwise..

..all events reported on this blog actually happened in reality. Not so on belarustoday.blogspot.com, which bears the enigmatic warning:

This website is part of a foreign policy simulation. The events depicted are not actually taking place.

It's all the work of some bunch of political science wonks doing a scenario planning exercise. Apparently they wanted a random "Salam Pax-meets-Neeka-meets-that bloke in his NOC in New Orleans during the hurricane" figure to give it bloggy goodness. I think one could have given the thing more colour, but it's a nice idea.

The scenario exercise seems to have gone off with a hypothetical bang. At endex, the US and Italian (eh?) air forces were in the process of intervening after one lot of Belarussian soldiers bombarded Minsk to get at the others, the NATO Secretary General (a thinly disguised version of Lord Robertson of Port Ellen) had suffered a heart attack, and Gerhard Schröder had made himself extremely unpopular, whilst Russian forces crossed the eastern border.