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benefited from using it as a turntable, whether to sell ‘laundered’ coal from the Donbas pseudo-states to Ukraine and the West or allowing the elite to smuggle in their sanctioned luxury goods.
Putinthebootin
Does this mean doing nothing, though? Not at all. Rather, that any measures need to be smart, carefully targeted and above all imaginative. The evidence suggests that the old toolbox simply is not up to the job – claims that, for example, Western threats of sanctions forced Russia to abandon planned military intervention in Ukraine in March are
based wholly on assumptions and wishful thinking. Instead, authoritarian regimes such as Lukashenko’s and Putin’s (and many more) have demonstrated depressingly strong capacities to resist sanctions that thus become, more than anything else, a way of comforting the West that it is good – rather than actually doing any good.
First of all, the Belarusian regime’s capacity to oppress its enemies ought to be targeted. Not least, this should mean expelling known and suspected KGB officers in embassies across Europe, a co-ordinated cleaning of the stables that would not only be a powerful symbol of unity and will but also seriously degrade Minsk’s capability to continue to hound the opposition. Given that, for example, former minister turned opposition figure Pavel Latushko was recently warned by a loyalist parliamentarian that he could be returned to Belarus “in the boot of a car”, such moves matter.
Secondly, given that the leadership of the opposition and the free media which undermines Lukashenko’s propaganda is now based abroad, direct assistance to them would be
a suitably asymmetric response. This may sound like it
is playing into his claims that the protesters are dupes
of the West, but so be it. Too much Western “support” is essentially rhetorical and for show – yet another photo op
with Tikhanovskaya – such that it is time to back that with money and genuine authority. Just to pluck a number from the air, €50mn is small change compared with the likely
costs to Europe from any economic sanctions, but would have a transformative impact on the capacity of the opposition
to spread their message, support the dependents of those in prison and otherwise act on the ground. Visas for those fleeing persecution, stepped-up efforts to monitor and record abuses and the identities of those involved, all these measures can help by supporting Belarusians themselves in their struggle against repression.
Finally, the right political signalling is crucial. It is probably too late to hope that Putin could be encouraged to do anything positive – but it is still worth trying to avoid pushing him into anything negative. Sanctioning Moscow directly
or indirectly for its ties to Belarus will only make it more determined to resist what it will regard as gibridnaya voina, the West’s hybrid warfare aimed at marginalising and “house training” Russia. There is a wider crisis in Russo-Western relations, to be sure, but viewing this latest incident in that context betrays and belittles the Belarusians’ own struggle with Lukashenko and will just exacerbate the situation.
In a perverse way, Lukashenko is right that today’s Belarus is a proving ground for Western policy. Not as he means it, of course, but that it provides an opportunity not only to see
if the EU can rise to the challenge – this is, after all, first
and foremost a European issue – but also whether the West generally can demonstrate the finesse, imagination and nuance to be able to find ways of influencing this situation for the better, rather than relying on a discredited and undiscriminating old set of responses.
Mark Galeotti is director of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence and also an honorary professor at UCL School of Slavonic & East European Studies.
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Contents
Top stories
Russia’s top retail and tech companies
March 2020
www.intellinews.com
@bneintellinews
join forces to hunt for innovations in rest of the world
Ukraine-born startups raised more than half a billion dollars in 2019 Russian video streaming platforms gain speed
Cloud services take off in Russia SEMrush to SEO success
Leaders
Russia’s internet giant Yandex announces growing and more diversified revenues in 2019 Russian telecom major Rostelecom misses on earnings in 4Q19, cash flow solid
Investment
the
2
4
5 6 8
9
10 12
13
Russia’s top retail and tech companies
join forces to hunt for innovations in
the rest of the world
BAs Russia’s retail and tech sectors consolidate, the leading companies are turned their gaze outwards to hunt for
World Bank approves $35mn project
to modernise Kyrgyz tax administration and statistical system 13 Romanian online home decoration
retailer raises €3.5mn in bonds 14 Russian billionaires Abramovich, Gutseriev, said to invest in Telegram
crypto project TON 14 Russian fund Da Vinci Capital gets
€30mn from Germany’s DEG to invest
in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan 15
Fintech & E-commerce 16
Russian e-commerce major
Wildberries to add self-employed
vendor products to offering 16 Russian Dixy retailer to launch online sales with Ozon 17 Valuation of Sistema’s e-commerce
asset Ozon boosted to $1.8bn 17
Telecom 19
Makedonski Telekom’s net profit
up 6% y/y in 2019 19 Romanian telco Digi grows by double
digit rates in 2019 19 Russia could postpone 5G rollout
from 2022 to 2024 20
NIBs 21
bne:Tech
new technology and innovation.
See page 2
Ukraine-born startups raised more
than half a billion dollars in 2019
In 2019, the venture capital and private equity funding volume for Ukrainian and Ukrainian-founded tech startups reached $544mn (up from $323mn in 2018 and $265mn in 2017), says AVentures Capital’s latest industry report ”DealBook of Ukraine”,
reports Adrien Henni of Ukraine Digital News. See page 4
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