White House national security adviser John Bolton’s unexpected meeting with “the last dictator in Europe” could undermine a vital Russian alliance, with potentially high stakes for Russian President Vladimir Putin himself.
“It is extraordinary that Ambassador Bolton went to Belarus,” Heather Conley, director of the Europe Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s clearly a strong message to the Kremlin, that — as the Kremlin becomes more deeply involved in our neighborhood, whether that’s Cuba or Venezuela — the U.S. will play a more assertive role in its neighboring countries.”
There’s no sharper way to make that point, in terms of symbolic meetings, than by making the first visit by a senior U.S. official to Minsk since 2001. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has kept close to Russia since 1994, using the partnership to maintain his own authoritarian control in the former Soviet satellite state.
“It kind of makes Russia unbalanced,” Luke Coffey, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. “It makes Russia unsteady on its feet that, all the sudden, Bolton shows up after 18 years.”
The United States and Belarus have had a bad relationship for years, reaching a nadir in 2008 when Lukashenko, angered by U.S. sanctions punishing his undemocratic elections and arrest of protesters, expelled 10 American diplomats. Trump’s administration extended those sanctions in 2019, including the restrictions targeting Lukashenko himself, but those measures didn’t stop Bolton from having an “unexpectedly” long meeting with the strongman on Thursday.
“We covered a lot of ground,” Bolton said, taking care to note that he spoke with Lukashenko for two hours and 15 minutes. “We didn’t resolve any issues, certainly, I didn’t come into the conversation with the expectation that we would, but I thought it was a fascinating conversation.”
Bolton’s visit derives additional significance from persistent rumors that Putin is interested in an official union with the former Soviet vassal state, an idea he didn’t hesitate to confront.
“It’s been the consistent policy of the United States since [the collapse of the Soviet Union] that we support the sovereignty and independence of the countries,” Bolton told reporters. “In the United States, we know where sovereignty lies. It lies in ‘We the people,’ the first three words of our Constitution. And so, what the people of Belarus want really should determine what their relationship with Russia is.”
Those comments might seem like an anodyne invocation of the American system, but Putin’s government often complains about U.S. efforts “to promote democracy in Russia.” The Kremlin might be especially irritated that Bolton would do so in Belarus, given Putin’s tactic of playing up cultural and ethnic ties to maintain political influence in the former Soviet space.
“Belarus is a ‘founding country’ of the Russian world, or of the Eurasian project, if you will,” Valparaiso University’s Nicholas Denysenko, an expert in Moscow’s use of the Russian Orthodox Church as a geopolitical tool, told the Washington Examiner. “To be sure, even mild interest in the U.S. would be a blow to Putin, especially given the slow decline of approval for him in Russia itself.”
Putin might take the comments even more personally, given that a union with Belarus has been touted as a potential way to sidestep the term limits that would force him to leave the Kremlin after 2024 under the current Russian Constitution.
“Putin clearly understands what it means if he leaves power,” a Baltic diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Examiner. “People are waiting in line and are silently hoping to cut throats [of] each other because of how Russia went down as a country from a democratic country to a country of dictatorship.”
Of course, Lukashenko is no budding Democrat; he has a long history of trying to play Western powers and Russia against each other in order to preserve his own regime. But there are signs that Minsk feels real unease about the Kremlin’s intentions in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014.
“2014 was not just a defining moment for Ukraine, it sent a chilling message to Belarus, to Kazakhstan, to all the former Soviet republics that Russia does not acknowledge your sovereignty,” Conley said.
In March, the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused a Russian diplomat of treating the country like a “federal district” rather than a sovereign nation. And Lukashenko announced in December that he would no longer refer to Russia as “a brother state” because “apparently new people have come, to whom this concept is unacceptable.”
That’s a pointed rebuff of Putin’s governing ideology. Weeks later, Lukashenko lifted the cap on the number of U.S. diplomats allowed in the country. Lukashenko’s relationship with the European Union is also improving, according to Coffey.
“You throw in the visit by Bolton and you start to see a trajectory,” the Heritage analyst said. “Admittedly, it’s not a rapid trajectory, but there is one, in a certain direction.”
Belarusian dissidents agree that Lukashenko feels vulnerable to Russia, but they cautioned against thinking he will ever be a true partner of the United States.
“You cannot use Lukashenko as a lesser evil against Putin because evil is evil,” Andrei Sannikov, a prominent opposition figure who now lives in exile, said in May.
Bolton acknowledged that there are “significant” obstacles to a partnership with Belarus, with Lukashenko’s human rights abuses not least among them.
“The geo-strategic environment in this part of Europe — and really considering global threats around the world — should at least cause us to have a conversation about where Belarus’s interests and the interests of the United States coincide,” he said. “We’re going to have to work through these other issues.”
And Putin will surely work to prevent Bolton from making too much progress in that direction, especially if the former KGB colonel concludes that Belarus offers the best chance to preserve his own place atop Russian politics.
“He’s a prisoner of himself, of his own policies,” the Baltic diplomat said. “I think that he’s afraid to leave the office.”
