This week, Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko visited one of the nation’s major state factories in the capital, Minsk, of purpose to show that he still had support despite national calls for his dismissal. He had done well to remember Nicolae Ceausescu.
The decision of Romania’s last communist leader to counter an emerging revolution by proving thousands of loyal factory workers to a rally in December 1989 proved a fatal mistake. He was heckled and had escaped by helicopter, taken prisoner and abused within four days.
The parallels with Lukashenko’s reception at the Minsk Wheel Tractor Plant, which builds transporters for Russian missiles, were striking. He was also witched off his stage Monday, a massive truck trailer.
“Belarus will never be the same,” Nigel Gould-Davies, a former UK ambassador to the republic, said in an online briefing. “Lukashenko has no future. It is at least impossible for me to keep him in any capacity. “
Five days after his abortive factory visit, Lukashenko remains in power. He appears determined to continue in the face of protests that have drawn hundreds of thousands to the streets and international condemnation of the presidential election on August 9 which he claimed to have won by a landslide to extend his 26-year rule.
And much has changed in the world since the fall of Romania’s dictator amid a revolutionary vote that ousted communist regimes in Eastern Europe and announced the end of the Cold War.
The US under President Donald Trump appears less interested in dealing with European security issues. And where Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev was ousted in 1989 for the loss of Soviet Union’s Eastern European satellites, Vladimir Putin is today seeking to regain control of Russia’s so-called near abroad.
Russia thinks of itself as losing Lukashenko Can’t be that bad
How the story of Belarus’s notable protest movement ends – either with Lukashenko dismissed, related to Ceausescu, or clinging to power through a mix of oppression and external support such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro – will have important implications not only for this nation of 9.4 million, but also its neighbors in the European Union and Russia.
Romanian military tanks take over central Bucharest on December 24, 1989.
Photographer: Christophe Simon / AFP via Getty Images
Military deployment
Lukashenko still appears to be monitoring Belarusian security services and is ready to use them. On Friday, he accused the West of plotting an invasion to take the Grodno region in Belarus near the border with Poland, where he had previously deployed troops for large-scale exercises. He said he had told Putin about the threat, adding that Belarus’s security was also a problem for Russia.
For Gould-Davies, now a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, it’s probably just a matter of time. The images of Ceausescu and Lukashenko are heckled by the workers who claim to represent a prey to European democratization, which began with the triumph of the Polish Solidarity Movement in the summer of 1989 and remains, despite commitment, today .
Putin told German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron in phone calls that he would consider all European interference as “unacceptable”, potentially setting the stage for another chaotic geopolitical pull over a former Soviet republic, in the footsteps of Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.
On Wednesday, leaders of the 27 EU member states tried to step in, saying in a virtual summit that they did not recognize the elections in which Lukashenko claimed 80% of the vote and a sixth term, while stopping shortly. for a new mood.
Putin, for his part, has been pushing for years for Lukashenko to agree to merge its two countries into a unified state, which the Belarussian leader agreed in principle to do in 1999 under former Russian President Boris Yeltsin. He has since resisted fiercely, fearing a takeover of Putin.
Although a weakened Lukashenko presidency could offer Putin the chance to finally seal that deal, it is no longer a given that Belarus’s long-serving strongman would have the authority at home to enforce any agreement. Some in the Kremlin’s circle are already wondering whether Russia would be better deal with the opposition than Lukashenko fell.
“Russia was, is and will be engaged in Belarusian politics and Belarusian economy,” Anna Maria Dyner, a security analyst at the Polish Institute of International Affairs, said in a virtual briefing.
Modern state
Catastrophically damaged during World War II, Belarus was rebuilt under the Soviet Union to become one of the richest and most technologically advanced republics. Independence, when that came in 1991, did not seem very welcome, with 84% of voters voting to stay in the union in a preliminary referendum organized by Soviet authorities. Re-unification with Russia became a popular idea.
However, that changed over time as the country gained its first lasting experience as a modern, independent state, according to Nelly Bekus, a specialist in the former Soviet space who teaches history to the UK’s University of Exeter.
Belarus was signed into a political union in the 13th century, including the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. But according to a February poll by the non-governmental BAW polling agency, 75% of Belarusians now want to remain independent.
Putin has long missed the opportunity to capture a willing Belarusian majority in Russia, Bekus says, though not because of either nationalist or pro-Western sentiments, both of which are again absent from the protests. Rather than the birth of a nation, she said, “what we are witnessing is the birth of a democracy.”
The problem for all sides is that demands for justice and democratic rights do not fit well with any bid to subordinate the country less to Russia’s own than democratic political system, while the geopolitically neutral tenor of the protests are probably not enough to satisfy Putin’s unionist ambitions. On Thursday, Russia’s own opposition leader, Alexey Navalny, was in intensive care at a Siberian hospital of suspected poisoning.
Opposition leader in Russia after ‘poisoning’ (1)
The result for Belarus is, according to Dyner, a fleeting situation in which Putin is both reluctant to intervene directly out of fear of anti-Russian sentiment, and hesitant to force pro-democracy Protestants to replace Lukashenko.
“You can’t predict what will happen tonight, let alone in the longer term,” she said.
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