Belarusian involvement in an expanded Russian war against Ukraine would risk bringing the end of dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s regime, U.S. officials warned the strongman in response to the deployment of Russian forces in Belarus.
“I believe Belarus’s complicity in such an attack would be completely unacceptable to Belarusians and to many inside the regime, as well as to us and our allies and partners,” a senior State Department official told reporters. “And we’ve made our concerns known to the Belarusian authorities privately.”
Western officials have long regarded Belarusian security services as a Kremlin asset on NATO’s eastern flank and the border of Ukraine, a misgiving that has deepened as Lukashenko looked to Moscow for assistance in withstanding protests that erupted after he claimed victory in last year’s contested presidential election. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team declined to reveal how the United States would respond to such a joint effort against Ukraine but implied that such a course could fracture his own regime.
“[Belarus] has been committed to neutrality. … The breadth of the commitment to the neutrality concept, I think, is well understood amongst the elite,” the senior State Department official said. “Increasingly, members of the elite are uncomfortable with where Lukashenko is heading and the speed at which he is taking Belarus closer and closer to Russia. That is not a concept that I believe has widespread support in Belarus’s elite.”
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Belarus’s participation in a prospective conflict could pose a major threat to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The route between the Belarusian border and the capital city of Kyiv is very short (less than a few hours’ drive) and relatively unguarded. Most Ukrainian troops are deployed on the opposite end of the country, holding the line of control against the Russian and Russian-controlled separatists in eastern Ukraine.
“It’d be like [if] the Russians parked in central Virginia, facing Washington,” retired four-star Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, NATO’s supreme allied commander when Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, told the Washington Examiner. “The bottom line is, you want to bring great pressure on Zelensky, put an invading force a couple of hours away from [the Ukrainian] capital with no military between you and it.”
U.S. and European allies courted Lukashenko throughout 2019 and in the spring of 2020 when his resistance to a political union with Russia raised the prospect that he might close Putin’s preferred path to remain in office beyond the existing term limits. That alliance ended amid the regime’s crackdown on election protesters last year, as neighboring NATO countries provided sanctuary to Belarusian opposition leaders and Lukashenko claimed alleged threats from NATO necessitated “union state” measures that he had previously opposed.
His regime last month announced it is “considering the possibility of deploying nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory” and unveiled draft constitutional amendments that would expunge the current constitution’s declaration of “neutrality” and commitment to “non-nuclear status.” The proposed revisions include another amendment that would authorize Lukashenko to remain in power until 2035 — a timetable that tracks closely with the recent revisions to the Russian constitution that give Putin the option to stay in office until 2036.
“The proposed changes to the constitution include language that could be interpreted as paving the way for Russia to garrison forces on Belarusian territory. This would present a significant change for Belarus, and such a step would present a challenge to European security that may require a response.”
Putin regards Ukraine and Belarus as part of “a single large nation, a triune nation,” while accusing Western-backed Ukrainian authorities of trying to attack that unity.
“It would not be an exaggeration to say that the path of forced assimilation, the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us,” Putin wrote in July.
That essay is the ideological key to the latest Russian threats against Ukraine, according to British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, who accused Putin of engaging in a selective misreading of European history.
“If you start and stop your view of Russian history between 1654 and 1917 then you can fabricate a case for a more expansive Russia, perhaps along the lines of the motto of the Russian Tsar before the Russian Empire — ‘Sovereign of all of Rus: the Great, the Little, and the White’ — Russia, Ukraine and Belarus respectively,” Wallace wrote in an essay published Monday. “And crucially you must also forget the before and after in history. You must ignore the existence of the Soviet Union, breaking of the Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty, and the occupation of Crimea.”
Lukashenko appeared willing to challenge Putin’s view of Russian and Belarusian unity before his recent domestic political troubles. In 2018, he announced he would no longer refer to Russia as “a fraternal state” with Belarus. But Lukashenko has accepted the little-brother status more recently — they even played on the same team in a hockey game in December. (Putin outscored Lukashenko, 7-2.)
That game was played just weeks after the Belarusian autocrat applauded the idea that Moscow and Minsk coordinate to “protect our brotherly nations’ common historical and ethical values” in November.
“Make no mistake, Russia will continue supporting the brotherly people of Belarus,” Putin replied. “The Union State will make meaningful progress in promoting integration.”
Lukashenko’s acquiescence to that integration, Blinken’s team acknowledged, raises questions about who will make the final decision about Russian military garrisons in Belarus.
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“It’s a complex question,” the senior State Department official said. “I do believe that Lukashenko is largely … in control of the levers of government. The question is, where does their authorities, at this point, end, and where do the Kremlin’s begin. And that is very uncertain.”
