MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday issued a scathing warning to protesters in Belarus not to push too hard to overthrow their country’s ousted president, saying Russia had formed a special reserve force of security officers to order recover in case of chaos in its western neighbor.
Speaking in an interview with Russian state television, Mr Putin said he had been instructed to set up a “certain reserve of judicial officials” at the request of Belarus’ authoritarian leader Alexander G. Lukashenko. He said the force had not yet been deployed because “we have also agreed that it will not be used if the situation gets out of control.”
Mr Putin’s remarks sent the strongest warning yet that Russia could use force to stop more than two weeks of protests in Belarus, which he described as “perhaps the closest country to us.” Speaking at a disputed presidential election on August 9, Belarus added that “we certainly do not care what happens next.”
But Mr Putin is cautious about sucking into Mr Lukashenko’s struggle for survival. That would invite worldwide condemnation and possibly new Western sanctions – and, most importantly, the risk that the general pro-Russian population of Belarus would become another home of seething anti-Moscow sentiment such as Ukraine.
Belarus occupies strategically important territory between Russia and the West, and although Mr Lukashenko’s opponents claim that they have no intention of joining Belarus in NATO or the European Union at the expense of Russia, the spectacle of mass protests against a rig of election nerves set in motion in the Kremlin.
“For Putin, Belarus is an existential question,” said Andrei Kortunov, director general of the Russian Council on International Affairs, a research organization close to the Russian government.
Belarus is different from former Soviet countries such as the Baltic states, which have never had much in common with Russia and established long-functioning democracies, Mr Kortunov said. The country is so close and similar to Russia that a successful shift towards greater political multilingualism “would make it very difficult to argue that the current model we have in Russia is the only one that can ever exist.”
Russia’s own elections, including a July vote on constitutional amendments allowing Mr Putin to extend his rule until 2036, are often reminiscent of the disputed Belarusian presidential election on August 9, in which Mr Lukashenko demanded a landslide victory. Mr Putin attacked Protestants in Moscow following his own dealings with Russia in Russia in 2011, unleashing a cycle of repression that largely succeeded in demobilizing opponents.
Some analysts have drawn parallels between Russia’s desire to end the riots in Belarus and last week’s attack on Mr Navalny, the anti – corruption activist who helped mobilize protests in the winter. of 2011-12 and became Mr. Putin’s most prominent opponent. At the time of the poisoning – which the Kremlin denies, despite the findings of German doctors – Mr Navalny returned to Moscow from a trip to Siberia to gather support for local opposition candidates.
Mr Navalny has embarked on a crackdown on political protests in Russia’s formerly sluggish hinterland, particularly in the Far Eastern Khabarovsk region, where tens of thousands have been gathering for more than a month each week for the arrest. of a popular election. governor.
The Khabarovsk protests, although largely driven by local complaints, dissuaded the Kremlin by stating that unrest, once largely confined to urban centers such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, could easily spread to remote areas. in a time of deep economic pain due to the coronavirus pandemic. Since the virus hit Russia, Mr Putin’s approval ratings have dropped to their lowest level since coming to power in late 1999.
Mr Putin insisted on Thursday that security forces would not be sent to Belarus as long as “extremist elements hiding behind political slogans” did not cross “certain boundaries”, which he defined as setting fire to cars and property or try to take administrative action. buildings.
But Mr Putin, while trying to keep his options open, is taking the risk in Belarus by Mr Lukashenko, “who will definitely interpret this as a recommendation” and could easily “burn a few cars” to Asking for Russian intervention, Mr Kortunov said.
Any warning from Russian troops in Belarus, he warned, would “only make an explosion of anti-Russian sentiment” and alienate a country where the vast majority of people, unlike in Ukraine, speak Russian and no deep enmity has against Moscow. ,
In the television interview, Mr Putin himself emphasized the cultural, linguistic and economic relations between Belarus and Russia, which he said bought 90 percent of Belarus’s agricultural exports. “Obviously we have certain commitments against Belarus,” he added.
He said Russia had responded to Belarus’ protests with more “restraint and neutrality” than the United States and Europe, which imposed new sanctions on Minsk. But he also sent a clear message that Moscow would under no circumstances allow its neighbor to work more closely with the West and NATO, the US-leading military alliance, as happened after a popular revolution in Ukraine in 2014.
His warning that Russia could intervene, said Nina Khrushcheva, a Russian expert at the New School in New York, signaled less “full support for Lukashenko than a message to the West: If you continue to push Belarus, you will you have another Ukraine on your hands. “
After demonstrators backed by the United States and Europe over the fall of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, Russia seized Crimea and armed rebellion in the Russian-speaking east of Ukraine. leading to the deepest East-West crisis since the Cold War.
The opposition in Belarus has tried hard to show that Russia does not do any harm. Protests in Minsk, the capital, sometimes carried Russian flags along with the red-and-white banner of Mr Lukashenko’s opponents.
Dmitry Trenin, head of the Moscow Carnegie Institution, recently wrote that Mr Lukashenko “was on the verge of an inevitable and dishonest exit”, and that Russia’s “worst option” was to transfer power to a leader who ‘ t was acceptable to both Russia and Protestants.
Mr Putin on Thursday stopped short of clearly endorsing Mr Lukashenko, and even hinted at criticism, saying that “when people take to the streets, everyone here should take note, listen and respond.”
But Mr Putin did not hesitate to reach a compromise with Mr Lukashenko, saying only that it was possible, as the Belarussian leader himself had suggested, to revise the constitution to allow for new elections in the future. .
Belta, the official news agency in Belarus, announced on Thursday that Mr Lukashenko would discuss possible constitutional changes – but only with “labor unions and student teams.” That closes the door for talks with Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, his main rival in the contested election, who is now in neighboring Lithuania, or a council set up in Minsk by protest leaders, many of whom have been arrested.
Mr Putin has not complained about Mr Lukashenko’s brutal initial reaction to Protestants. Indirectly asked about police brutality against Protestants in Belarus, Putin said he turned the issue around, as he often does, after violence in the United States, referring to the recent shooting of police in Wisconsin.
Belarus’s aldermen, Mr Putin said, “behaved with restraint” compared to “what is happening in some countries.”
