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More broadly, Lukashenko is trying to spin his brutal thuggery at home as a first line of defence for Moscow, claiming that the West is developing its techniques for “hybrid war” in Belarus before unleashing them on Russia. Although this undoubtedly fits the paranoid current mood in the Kremlin, it seems to have done little to endear him to Putin, who pointedly refrained from joining in with Lukashenko’s histrionics.
After all, Putin has good reasons to be furious. Russian support – financial, political, intelligence – is helping keep Lukashenko’s beleaguered regime alive, yet he continues not only to assert his independence, but also renege or backpedal on existing deals. A new constitution, which Moscow
would like to see dilute the president’s powers, seems to be receding over the horizon, with Lukashenko now promising a draft ready for the end of 2021, but with little credibility
or conviction. Belarus has not even recognised Russia’s annexation of Crimea, something Moscow might have hoped a billion dollars of credit might buy.
Meanwhile, a brazen gambit intended presumably not simply to arrest one admittedly significant figure within the opposition media but intimidate the rest of émigré political movement, has bounced Putin into supporting Lukashenko right before his summit with US President Joe Biden. At
the very least, this becomes a distraction; at worst, it will overshadow what was meant to be a demonstration that Russia is a great power whose president is the equal of America’s.
Putinthemiddle
It also, of course, raises questions as to how Minsk can be punished most effectively in the modern, politically and economically interconnected world.
First of all, the habitual use of sectorial economic sanctions always risk unintended consequences. Indeed, the irony is that some would directly benefit Russia. Moves to block exports of Belarusian potash, for example, would open up new market opportunities for Russia’s industry (and potentially drive up
“The tragic irony would be if moves meant to punish Minsk actually forced Putin’s hand”
prices for European clients). In any case, the evidence that this would bring about positive change – and at less than glacial speed, at that – is distinctly unclear. Potash, for example, accounts for a substantial 20% of Belarus’s budget revenues, but at least part of the shortfall could be met by pivoting to other markets in Asia and Latin America. Nonetheless, this
is the kind of measure that will undoubtedly affect ordinary Belarusians, which might make them more inclined to protest,
Opinion 69 but will not have a quick or devastating impact on the security
apparatus on which Lukashenko’s power now rests.
Secondly, there is the continuing disagreement about the fundamental intent. There are those who see Putin as the
only source of meaningful pressure on Lukashenko, and who therefore argue that Russia needs to be sanctioned precisely to force the Kremlin to bring that pressure to bear. Then
there are others who, to be blunt, simply see this as one engagement in a wider war with Russia. While they affect the same rhetoric as the former group, they are happy simply to use Minsk’s adventurism and brutality as an excuse to call for the usual measures against Russia – cancelling Nord Stream 2, suspending it from the SWIFT system and so on – not because they really think this will hit Minsk, but because they want to undermine the Kremlin.
The tragic irony would be if moves meant to punish Minsk actually forced Putin’s hand. For all Belarus and Russia have been in a ‘Union State’ since 1999, this does not really mean
a merger. Putin’s goal, it appears, is to institutionalise Belarus’s status as a part of Russia’s sphere of influence through all the integration that suits the metropolis, from defence to the economy, but no more. Empires are expensive things, after all, and Moscow is already paying to greater or lesser extents for Chechnya, Crimea, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and the Donbas (and continuing troop deployments to Tajikistan, Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Syria and Libya). There is little if any appetite for actually taking on the full burden of a country with a GDP per capita less than two- thirds of Russia’s.
This is why Putin’s game plan appears to be to engineer,
as soon as he can, a transfer of power, to try to maintain
the regime but with a less toxic figure at its helm. Already potential replacements are apparently being auditioned. Lukashenko, as wilful as he is wily, is obviously going to do all he can to avert this. Indeed, part of his calculations when he ordered that Ryanair flight brought down – and there is also no evidence to suggest he was not behind, or at least wholly supportive of this move – may have been precisely to engineer a situation in which Putin, who never wants to look as if he can be influenced by Western rhetoric or pressure, feels he has to give Lukashenko his personal backing.
However, if Belarus is hit by wider economic sanctions and
if it genuinely looks as if Russia will have to choose between letting the regime fall to the street, or accepting the costs
of bankrolling it, then there may be those in Moscow who question the wisdom of open-ended sanctions but limited control. To be blunt, at what point would Putin feel that he owned what he was paying for? Thus, clumsy policies could actually force a reluctant merger or full Russian intervention. Those who suggest that Putin has gained from this crisis
as it burns Belarus’s bridges with the West forget that not only were those bridges already well and truly destroyed
by months of brutal repression, but that Russia actually
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