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68 Opinion
bne July 2021
STOLYPIN:
The challenges of targeting Minsk and doing more harm than good
Mark Galeotti
Will the West end up saving Alexander Lukashenko by its eagerness to target Vladimir Putin? Will it force a Belarus-Russian Anschluss that no one – not Europe, not Moscow, not Minsk – really wants? The crisis over Belarus following the Ryanair incident highlights the dilemmas
of modern policy-making, and the sometimes confused motivations in play.
Putindunnit
Unsurprisingly, from the first many have sought to roll Lukashenko’s latest outrage into the wider Russia crisis. Yale historian Timothy Snyder flatly asserted on Twitter that “Belarus would not have hijacked an EU plane without Russian approval” and so sanctions for the act should hit Russia (although he walked that back in a subsequent blog post, adding an all-important caveat that “Perhaps Russian authorities had prior knowledge that the hijacking would take place”). However, by then the hare was running.
There were the initial claims that the men who disembarked in Minsk alongside Roman Protasevich were Russians, so clearly this was at least an operation jointly run by the Belarusian KGB and their Russian FSB counterparts. Except that it turned out they were Belarusians (and one Greek, who had been heading to Minsk anyway). Then there was the claim that the KGB had no track record of running such operations without the Russians holding their hands; they have actually been aggressively tracking, spying on and harassing opposition figures in the West on their own account for over a decade.
The fact that Russian and Belarusian air defence is integrated meant that Lukashenko could not have ordered a MiG-29 fighter into the skies to escort the plane to Minsk without Moscow’s approval. Except that this ‘integration’ doesn’t actually deprive the Belarusian commander-in-chief of his command – at most it means Moscow would have known when it happened.
Above all, though, there was the underlying contention, foreshadowed by Snyder, that Lukashenko is just a Russian puppet who, in the words of Republican Senator – and
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member of the Select Committee on Intelligence – Ben Sasse, “doesn’t use the bathroom without asking for Moscow’s permission.”
Of course, this is wildly inaccurate, mischaracterising the relationship between two men who – for all the awkward congeniality on display at their recent meeting in Sochi – dislike and mistrust each other, but find themselves in
a mutually inconvenient co-dependency.
As Franak Viacorka, one of opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya’s advisers, more accurately put it: “Lukashenko doesn’t listen to anyone... He’s an absolutely unpredictable, rather impulsive person.” He is also jealous of his autonomy. Until recently he had ensured that by playing Putin off against the West, but he now finds himself with no ally but Russia in light of his virtual declaration of war against his own people. Putin, unwilling to go down in history as the tsar responsible for the ‘Ungathering of the Russian Lands,’ cannot afford to see Belarus follow Ukraine as a popular rising replaces a Moscow-leaning regime and instead moves their country towards Europe.
Putinfuriated
Of course, so long as Moscow supports the Lukashenko regime, it shares some of the moral culpability for Lukashenko’s erratic and brutal measures. (Though at the risk of “whataboutism,” we have to remember the degree to which the West often supports unpleasant authoritarians, believing them to be the least-worst or geopolitically necessary option.) However, contrary to the notion that Russia is backing Lukashenko to the hilt, it has actually done the least it can.
Blocking a few flights to Moscow which had planned to avoid Belarusian airspace “for technical reasons” – while letting others in – is at best a cosmetic and likely temporary gesture of solidarity in response to Europe’s blanket ban. Likewise, the $500mn loan announced at the Sochi summit is simply the next tranche of a $1.5bn agreed last year rather than any new money.