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Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarus, as well as Alexander Lukashenko, will meet in Sochi on Monday. According to the official agenda, the meeting will focus on energy, trade and strategic alliances.
What does Putin want?
“For Putin, it is important that he succeeds in pushing forward the twenty-year agreement that Belarus and Russia will become a union state,” says Jakob Hedenskog, a security policy analyst at the Swedish Defense Research Agency, FOI.
After several weeks of protests and after cutting ties with the West, Lukashenko finds himself in a weakened position. Something that Putin sees as an opportunity to meet his demands in the old agreement, which was not fully met before when Lukashenko resisted.
What does Lukashenko expect?
Lukashenko wants to stay in power, but since the Western powers no longer recognize him as a legitimate president, he in turn sees Putin as the only option left to do so, says Jakob Hedenskog.
Putin has promised to establish a military police force that can be deployed at short notice if protests in Belarus degenerate. First of all, both leaders likely want the protests to end on their own, but they haven’t and there is no tendency for this to happen.
Russia’s influence is expanding
– In the long term, this will lead to a proposal for constitutional changes in Belarus, where Putin and Russia will act as a kind of impartial mediator. The official purpose will be to make Belarus more democratic and new elections can be proposed. For a time, Russia will participate in changing the political system of Belarus.
According to Jakob Hedenskog, the purpose of this is to get the Belarusian population on the train and also to gain support from the West.
– But in fact, this will be a way to buy time, the protests are expected to end. Under the guise of democratization and constitutional changes, Russia hopes to increase its influence over the Belarusian political and economic system, says Jakob Hedenskog.
