President Joe Biden must hammer Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s regime with economic sanctions to sow dissension within his “cliques and cronies” regime, according to opposition leader Svetlana Tsikhanovskaya, who identified the crisis as a test of the new president’s pledge to confront authoritarianism.
“In this struggle, world struggle, between democracies and autocracies, it’s very important to show your teeth,” Tikhanovskaya told the Washington Examiner. “At the moment, Belarus is on the front line of this struggle.”
Biden has cast his foreign policy as an effort to ensure the victory of democratic powers in a systemic competition with autocrats. That emphasis from the White House is driven by the intensifying competition with China, but it has heartened Tikhanovskaya and her allies attempting to force Lukashenko into negotiations.
“They understand only the language of sanctions, and they’re afraid of sanctions,” she said of the regime. “And we are waiting for a split of elites, because of sanctions … Lukashenko is also dependent on businesses around him, businesses of his cronies that are based on the work of oil industry, of potash industry. And they will put pressure on him.”
Potash fertilizer is the regime’s second-largest export after refined petroleum, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity.
“We tried many times to appeal to this regime diplomatically,” she said. ”They don’t hear. They understand only the language of sanctions. And they’re afraid of sanctions. We understand that sanctions, as I say, it’s not a silver bullet for the solution of the crisis in Belarus, but they are very powerful for a change in behavior of the regime.”
That rhetoric has heartened Belarusian activists, but they worry economic interests will cause Western leaders to pull their punches in the fight with Lukashenko.
“It’s business interests,” Tikhanovskaya said, who wants Biden and other officials to be a “strong voice now for democratic changes because it’s what you have to defend. Not profit, not incomes. It’s something bigger than just existing profit of your enterprises and of your countries.”
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That’s a persistent dynamic as Western officials debate their policies toward authoritarian governments. Tsikhanovskaya, who was forced to leave Belarus after challenging Lukashenko in the 2020 presidential campaign that ended in mass protests against election fraud, visited Washington the same week the Biden’s administration and German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s teams unveiled an agreement related to the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany — a pipeline that Biden and Eastern European allies opposed due to the leverage the project will give the Kremlin.
European governments, and the European Union as a bloc, have made a concerted effort to punish Lukashenko, particularly after his regime forced a commercial airliner to land under a false pretext to arrest a journalist traveling from Greece to Lithuania.
But even those sanctions left most of the potash industry unaffected, due to “loopholes” that Tsikhanovskaya hopes Biden will close.
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“Your policy shouldn’t be profit-oriented but values-oriented,” she said. “It’s a moral obligation.”
