Page 56 - bne magazine September 2020 russia melting

56 Opinion
bne September 2020
STOLYPIN:
Moscow is not Minsk, but it is in its shadow
Mark Galeotti director of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence and also an honorary professor at UCL School of Slavonic & East European Studies
Can Lukashenko survive? While not impossible, it is looking increasingly unlikely. With the situation on the ground moving so quickly, though, I will not pretend to predict whether Lukashenko will have fallen, declared martial law, or however else he may have responded to the current wave of protests by the time this is published. As Lenin wrote, “it is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious law.”
The dilemma Lukashenko faces is a truly existential one, and there seem few good options available to him now he has opted to escalate his war on his own people.
He’s not the only one who is worrying, though. The sudden emergence of a nation-wide protest movement in Belarus, one that embraces students and pensioners, factory workers and computer programmers, is also posing a massive dilemma for the Kremlin, and one for which there seem similarly few good options.
The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It
Many outside commentators, used to writing about Russia and predicting Putin’s imminent demise, want to turn the discussion eastwards. (And don’t even get me started on those American writers who, as with seemingly everything else, want to use Lukashenko as a parable for Trump.) The assumption is that any victory for people power in Belarus must empower opposition to the Kremlin in Russia.
Ironically enough, Lukashenko himself has tried to adopt this argument in a bid to win Russian support. Before he had
a conversation with him on Saturday, Lukashenko told the Belta news agency that he needed to talk to Putin “because it is not a threat to just Belarus anymore.” Rather, “defending Belarus today is no less than defending our entire space, the Union State.”
This may be true, but we really ought not to take it as read. This was, after all, one of the conceits after the Euromaidan, and six years on there is little evidence that Russians see Ukraine as a role model. If anything the opposite is true: the Kremlin’s propagandists have quite successfully managed to make it a short-hand for chaos and, if anything, a return to a 1990s ‘time of troubles.’
Of course, the response is that Ukraine has not yet been able to fulfil its potential, that if and when it achieves the promise of the Maidan, then it will pose a dangerous alternative model
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for Russia. However, the point is precisely that six years on that is still far from a reality. Belarus – whose economy is still dependent on almost Soviet-style industrial leviathans and whose political system will need to be cleansed of 25 years of ‘Lukashenkoism’ – is unlikely to resolve its future challenges overnight.
If nothing else, the Kremlin itself – which usually errs on the side of paranoia – shows little sign yet of fearing democratic contagion. If anything, the messages in the state-controlled and -adjacent media suggest a growing disenchantment with ‘Batka’ such that the Russians would be willing to let him fall.
What Is To Be Done?
The Kremlin’s concerns are likely more geopolitical than that. At present, this is wholly anti-Lukashenko movement, with no anti-Russian dimension, nor even an explicitly pro-Western one.
Indeed, two of the three would-be opposition candidates, Viktor Babariko and Valery Tsepkalo, would likely to acceptable to Moscow, if they were willing to give it the right guarantees. Babariko had been given financial support by Russia’s Gazprom, and Tsepkalo had initially fled to Moscow, before moving on to Kyiv.
However, presumed rightful president-elect Svetlana Tikhanovskaya fled to exile in supportive neighbouring Lithuania and, although the chances of the EU bestirring itself actually to do anything until the crisis is settled one way or the other are minimal, many European countries are certainly making the right noises.
The danger, as far as Moscow is concerned, is that in any post-Lukashenko politics, the inevitable bidding war between candidates seeking to win support would lead to promises being made about EU membership or the like. To this extent, it makes no real difference whether or not these are plausible for a country which is so closely tied to Moscow. Russia, after all, accounts for more than a third of Belarusian exports and over half its imports. The two countries are also locked into mutual security guarantees and formal ‘Union State’ status.
Promises are the fuel of politics. In many ways Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych fell precisely because he promised a deal with the EU and then reneged on it under Russian pressure. Moscow must be concerned about a similar process in Belarus.