Belarus – Lukashenko’s dangerous political games with Russia and Ukraine
07/08/2020
On the night of 29 July, Belarus announced that it had arrested 33 citizens from Russia working for a “security” company (i.e. mercenaries in reality) for allegedly planning to destabilize the presidential election. Some of them having been Ukrainian citizens in the past, Ukraine jumped on the occasion and demanded the extradition of those involved in the Donbass war. As a result, Lukashenko is trying to raise the stakes between Russia and Ukraine in a most dangerous game, the consequences of which could be far more serious for Belarus than its President imagines.
Strange arrest of Russian citizens on bogus charges
While the presidential election is in full swing in Belarus, the
Minsk authorities announced that they had arrested 33 Russian citizens, belonging to the notorious Wagner company, on the pretext that they were planning to destabilize the situation in the country. But from the outset this scenario was sinking like the Titanic.
The men in question were unarmed and had entered Belarus legally.
They had gone to the hotel where they had provided their passports and then went to a sanatorium. And it was there that they allegedly attracted the attention of the authorities because they… were not drinking, were not partying, and were walking around in military dress.
Yes, it is true that it is “abnormal” to have mercenaries in transit for another country, who have serious combat experience, are in military dress, and do not drink, or go around nightclubs. Which serious security company would hire beginners and let its employees drink alcohol or go partying while they go on a mission? Come on, a bit of logic, please.
In front of such an unfathomable well of abyssal stupidity most sane people thought that this story would quickly collapse like a house of cards.
Moscow, moreover, repeatedly stressed the futility of the charges against the 33 Russian citizens in Belarus, and demanded that they be sent back to Russia.
Especially since their plane tickets to Turkey (for 25 July) were found by
Regnum’s Russian journalists and published online. There are even return tickets for October 2020.
Belarus then argued that they did not leave as planned on 25 July, which proves that they were not in transit, while at the same time saying that the messages that the Russians were exchanging indicated that they were waiting for another group of their compatriots. Or how to shoot in the head of the bogus “Russian-style Maidan” hypothesis.
If they did not take the flight on July 25, it is certainly precisely because they were waiting for the others to leave all together for their destination. So what is the point of this circus towards Russia on behalf of Belarus?
A totally chaotic presidential election
It is in the internal political situation in Belarus that we must look for the origin of this delusional attack against Russia. Lukashenko’s re-election is not going as well as he might have hoped, so
several potential candidates have been ousted on dubious pretexts, one has been arrested, the husband of an opponent of Lukashenko too, and another candidate has fled to Russia to avoid the same fate!
The presidential elections of 2020 in Belarus thus seem to be definitively marked by the seal of fraud. Indeed, on the first day of voting,
more than 2,000 violations were recorded by independent observers.
And in the midst of this mess,
Lukashenko made completely paranoid and contradictory statements about the use of nuclear weapons against his country, threatening his big neighbour with barely veiled words, complaining that relations with Russia have gone from being fraternal to being partners’ relations, saying that Moscow is afraid of losing Belarus because it would have no real allies besides itself (which contradicts the previous point), and
went completely delirious about the history of the arrested Russian citizens, adding even more entropy to the surrounding chaos.
Belarus even went so far as to hysterically
summon its reservists for military exercises near the Russian border the day after the presidential election!
And after having himself created this collective hysteria on the basis of a non-existent threat,
Lukashenko went so far as to reproach the “politicisation” of all this (by Russia), and the alleged attempts to scare him with the Americans and NATO, and the consequences of Belarus’s actions, saying that he knows them perfectly well.
The most unbelievable thing is that after having said in that statement that there was no point in frightening him with the United States and NATO, because it was not them who sent men to destabilize the situation in Belarus,
he then said that he had also arrested people with American passports who were married to women working for the American State Department.
After accusing Russia of trying to influence the presidential election in Belarus, Lukashenko has now flip-flopped and accused the United States as well, in order to prove to his electorate that he is not working for the United States (such accusations flourished after the arrest of Russian citizens). If this is what Lukashenko calls Belarus’ multi-vector approach, I regret to say that trying to sit with your ass between two chairs rarely ends well.
And it is not a “threat” about the consequences of his actions that to say it is a warning! If the example of the Maidan in Ukraine was not enough of a lesson for him, it is to be feared that he will end up much worse than Viktor Yanukovich. For in trying to play the Western card by openly negotiating with Ukraine the potential extradition of some of the arrested Russians, Lukashenko has crossed the Rubicon and openly betrayed Russia.
Belarus tries to raise the stakes between Russia and Ukraine, destroying the Minsk negotiating platform in the process
Indeed, Lukashenko in his paranoid outbursts does not seem to have understood that he has gone too far in his delirium. By making public the names, dates of birth and backgrounds of the arrested men, Belarus has
drawn the attention of Ukraine, which saw this as a golden opportunity to get its hands on some of the Donbass veterans.
Kiev requested the extradition of the Russian citizens concerned, arguing that some of them were originally Ukrainian citizens. Except that they had obtained Russian citizenship, and that argument therefore does not hold water, as the Russian authorities have pointed out, who have once again insisted on their return to Russia.
The problem is that instead of spurning Ukraine,
Lukashenko openly discussed the extradition of these Russian citizens with Vladimir Zelensky, the Ukrainian President, before giving an interview to Dmitry Gordon, the chief propagandist of Kiev!
An interview at the end of which
Gordon said that Belarus would agree to extradite Russian citizens requested by Ukraine.
While
many in Russia refuse to consider this possible (on the grounds that it would put an end to the union between the two countries, with disastrous consequences for Minsk), the mere fact that Belarus has even initiated official discussions on this subject without Russian participation was
considered unacceptable by Tatiana Moskalkova, the Russian human rights ombudsman.
And instead of calming down the game,
Lukashenko threw oil on the fire, issuing what is nothing more and nothing less than an ultimatum, asking Russia and Ukraine to send their General Prosecutors to Belarus to discuss all this, but that if they didn’t do so, Minsk would decide the fate of the arrested people all by itself! If that sounds like blackmail to you, that’s normal, because it is!
Lukashenko is actually trying to raise the stakes to get something from Russia. If
some experts think that it is a question of obtaining official recognition of the results of this totally fraudulent presidential election, others think that Lukashenko wants much more, and
would in fact like to get Russia to “shave for free” Belarus (i.e. to provide it with gas and oil at really cheap, not to say free of charge), hoping to resume good relations with Russia afterwards!
And for this
he counts on the “friendship” he thinks he has with Vladimir Putin, as he boasted in the interview he gave to Gordon.
Except that Lukashenko has forgotten one thing: if there is
one crime that is unforgivable in the eyes of Vladimir Putin, it is treason! As he said in an interview with the Financial Times in 2019, treason is “
the vilest crime imaginable”. Believing that after having crossed the Rubicon in this way, he will be able to pick up the pieces with Russia, even by giving back his citizens, shows that Lukashenko does not have the intelligence he thinks he has.
For even if he does not go until the end of the process and returns the 33 mercenaries to Russia, the very fact of having publicly considered extraditing some of them to Ukraine for their involvement in the Donbass war has just shattered Belarus’s neutrality in the conflict.
Yet it is this neutrality that had allowed Minsk to become a platform for negotiations, resulting in the agreements that bear its name! Without this neutrality, Minsk is no longer a safe place to conduct negotiations on the Donbass conflict once the coronavirus epidemic is over, and discussions between Ukraine and the two People’s Republics will no longer be held in video-conference format!
If
Ukraine totally destroyed the negotiation process, it was Belarus that destroyed the platform on which they were taking place, burying the Minsk agreements for good! For how could the DPR and LPR (Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics) send their representatives to negotiate in Belarus after that? How could the two republics risk having their foreign ministers arrested under a bogus pretext and extradited to Ukraine?
Whether or not he goes to the end of his suicidal approach, Lukashenko has already set in motion a process that could lead to chaos and the descent into hell of Belarus and its inhabitants. All this in order to keep his place as President, to try to extort more privileges from Russia, and to get the attention of the Russian authorities!
The Belarusian frog who wanted to make himself as big as Russian beef
The problem is that in order to carry out such blackmail against a country like Russia and make it bend, you need to have a strong enough backbone and not just 33 hostages. For if Minsk can titillate Moscow, Russia can plunge Belarus into chaos if it wants to.
As a reminder, almost
40% of Belarus’ exports are destined for Russia, and 60% of its imports come from the same country. One does not blackmail a country with such a large market share, except to be suicidal.
And if Lukashenko thinks he can compensate the loss of the Russian market by the Ukrainian market, or even the Western one, I advise him to look at the state of the Ukrainian economy to see what awaits him:
begging the IMF for crumbs, and having to sell everything and go through the austerity grinder to get those crumbs!
Russia was keen to sound a warning shot in order to give Belarus a foretaste of what awaits it if Lukashenko goes too far. It should be noted that the border between Russia and Belarus more or less resembles the borders in the Shengen area.
Until 1 August, truck drivers only had to show their passports to the border guards from the cab of their lorries and they passed without further formality. But on 1 August, Russia changed the rules, forcing drivers to get out of their lorries and queue at the checkpoint to show their passports and have everything recorded by computer. Officially it is because of the coronavirus, but one suspects that the date on which these measures came into force is mainly a warning to Minsk.
As a result,
queues of about ten kilometres formed on the border between Belarus and Russia! However, a large part of Belarusian exports to Russia are food products, mostly perishable. And that’s nothing yet, it’s just queues.
If Belarus extradites some of the arrested Russian citizens to Ukraine, then Minsk could taste the same soup as Turkey after it shot down a Russian military plane in 2015. The
economic sanctions imposed by Russia in Istanbul have cost Turkey more than $10 billion in economic losses. Enough to calm Erdogan down and make him apologize for the downed plane in order to prevent a total economic catastrophe!
Is Belarus really prepared to lose $12 billion in annual exports to Russia, but also the fact that Moscow regularly agrees to postpone the repayment of Minsk’s debts?
In his interview with Gordon,
Lukashenko complains about relations with his neighbour, saying that Russia is strangling Belarus and that it is a mistake for Moscow to have such relations with Minsk. But in reality what he is complaining about is not being maintained at the expense of the princess! If he wants to see what a real economic strangulation of his country is, all he has to do is to go till the end of his stupid move.
Seeing Lukashenko raise the stakes with his ultimatum to send the Russian and Ukrainian General Prosecutors, one gets the feeling that the Belarusian President is seeking the attention of his Russian counterpart. However, since the beginning of this crisis, Vladimir Putin has remained Olympian calm and has not contacted Lukashenko till the last moment to resolve the problem, which clearly shows that the friendship he boasts of with the Russian President exists only in his head!
If their relationship was what he claims, he would have immediately contacted Vladimir Putin from the very beginning of the incident to settle this in private. Instead, Lukashenko himself organized the dramatization and hysteria around this story for sordid electoral purposes.
As a result, Russia distanced itself from the chaos in Belarus and
refused to send its observers to monitor the presidential election.
And by wanting to play on both sides (Russian and Western), Lukashenko could well lose the support of both parties! Trying to sit with your ass between two chairs often ends up on the floor. The Belarusian President seems to have forgotten that you can’t have the butter, the money of the butter, the ass of the creamer and her smile with it.
Even if he wins this election, it is tainted by so many irregularities and violations that Lukashenko will have no legitimacy. Worse still, by wanting to eat off all the racks, the Belarusian President may well have sawed off the branch on which he is sitting.
And by alienating Russia, he has just closed the only way out he had if he fails in the elections, or if he is subsequently overthrown. For the West will not welcome “Europe’s last dictator” if he falls off its pedestal, and unlike Yanukovych, who had good relations with Russia, he will not be able to count on this second option either.
Contrary to some analysts, I do not rule out that Lukashenko could go through with his stupid move and extradite some of the Russian citizens arrested to Ukraine. Because Russia will not play its blackmail game. Moscow does not negotiate with terrorists and hostage-takers. Another fact that Lukashenko has forgotten.
And in view of the manifest instability of the Belarusian President (one only has to read his statements of the last few days, which contradict each other), no scenario should be ruled out on the pretext that it is totally suicidal for a country. Ukraine proved in 2014 that there are politicians crazy enough to engage in such stupid plans.
If Lukashenko goes through with this deadly step and is re-elected, then God help the Belarusian people. For the time being Russia is patiently waiting for the result of the elections in Belarus, and to see if Lukashenko will go through with his crazy move. Only once the situation is clear will Moscow react, and only then will it be possible to gauge the extent to which Belarus will or will not suffer as a result of the lamentable attitude of its President.
Christelle Néant
On the night of 29 July, Belarus arrested 33 citizens of Russia who allegedly wanted to destabilise the presidential election.
www.donbass-insider.com
I hink it has to do with the fact that many in Belarus, just like in Russia, are provoslavic, and there is also a big percentage of catholic, especially in the areas bordering Poland or Baltic countries.
