Russian President Vladimir Putin is willing to deploy forces to help Belarusian autocrat Alexander Lukashenko maintain control in the face of widespread protests against election fraud, the Kremlin chief said, blaming the unrest on Western countries.
“Mr. Lukashenko has asked me to create a reserve group of law enforcement personnel, and I have done this,” Putin told Russian media in an interview. “Now, it is not necessary, and I hope that it will never be necessary to use this reserve, which is why we are not using it.”
Belarus is Russia’s closest ally despite a fraught relationship between Lukashenko and the Russian leader. Putin’s apparent desire to tighten a political agreement that would make Belarus a junior part of the Russian state induced Minsk to renew contacts with the United States, but the domestic political crisis has driven Lukashenko back into Moscow’s arms, as he claims that European nations want to partition the country.
“Today, we are evidently experiencing, to put it bluntly, a certain stage of a hybrid war against Belarus,” Lukashenko claimed Thursday in remarks carried by state-run media. “How else can we call it? Media outlets and the information sphere are involved in this fight, the war of antagonistic sides.”
Putin and Lukashenko released those statements on the heels of a visit by Deputy Secretary of State Steve Biegun, who met with the Belarusian opposition leader in Lithuania before traveling to Moscow for meetings with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Western officials tend to doubt that Russia will intervene in any dramatic fashion unless Lukashenko seems very likely to fall without such assistance, but Putin’s history of sending “little green men” to annex Crimea and invade eastern Ukraine has raised the specter of Russia’s participation in such a crackdown.
“We know current Russian behavior is not very productive and peaceful — and definitely not rational,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius, whose government hosted Biegun’s meeting with Belarusian presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Wednesday. “So they are definitely stakeholders. … They will do their utmost not to lose Belarus.”
Tikhanovskaya has appealed for European help while demanding that Lukashenko agree to new elections, but Lukashenko has refused to engage in such talks beyond a general offer to consider forming a new constitution.
“That’s not taken very seriously by the local people who are protesting because that’s more taken as an attempt to buy time and just to dissuade the protests,” said Belarusian native Alena Kudzko, a senior foreign policy analyst at GLOBSEC in Bratislava, of the offer to draft a constitution.
Putin endorsed Lukashenko’s refusal to engage with a political council composed of opposition officials. “The Constitutional Court of Belarus issued a ruling, according to which it is absolutely unacceptable to establish supra-constitutional bodies,” he said. And he invoked the Union Treaty that he has used previously to push for tighter integration of Russia and the former Soviet vassal state.
“We have certain obligations toward Belarus,” Putin said while discussing the “reserve group” ready to help Lukashenko. “But we have also agreed that this group would not be used unless the situation becomes uncontrollable, when extremist elements — I would like to say this once again — when the extremist elements, using political slogans as a cover, overstep the mark and start plundering the country, burning vehicles, houses, banks, trying to seize administration buildings, and so on.”
