Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s regime has commemorated the founding of the Confederacy, continuing its theme of authoritarian taunts at the United States and signaling its deference to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“We acknowledge our mistakes and use this occasion to apologize for the absence of congratulations with the 160th anniversary of adoption of the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, whose flag is still dear to many Americans,” Belarus’s foreign ministry said Friday in a bulletin promoted by Russian state media.
American moral support for Belarusian pro-democracy activists has rankled Lukashenko in the months since he began repressing protesters who accused him of stealing the most recent presidential election. That controversy derailed U.S. efforts to lure him away from Putin, but Lukashenko’s decision to take offense to a U.S. Embassy statement marking Belarus’s brief independence from Russia following World War I suggests that he sees a link between his survival and the formation of the “union state” between Minsk and Moscow that Putin has sought.
“Lukashenko is definitely more open to the union state, but he wants, of course, to somehow retain some kind of position,” a Baltic official said.
The new foreign ministry statement was replete with puckish comments designed, in the first place, to rebuke Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team for honoring the Belarusian opposition. “We believe that only a truly inclusive dialogue will help the American nation to unite in this difficult moment in history,” the regime said in reference to racial and political tensions in the U.S. “As a selfless act of good will, Belarus … is ready to propose its services in organization of this process.”
Another barb signaled the affinity between Russian and Belarusian authorities.
“Deeply touched by the US’s attention to the destiny of Belarus, as a reciprocal step, we can make selfless contribution to development of Alaskan agriculture and development of its territories,” the regime’s diplomatic corps said. “In this regard, we are ready to look into an option of joint control over this territory.”
The U.S. purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867, when Minsk was subject to Moscow. Lukashenko might have avoided such a joke in 2019, when his distaste for Putin’s desire to implement a 1998 union treaty inclined him to rehabilitate diplomatic ties with the U.S. With Lukashenko now dependent on the Kremlin’s favor, Putin relieved Russia’s ambassador to Belarus, and Lukashenko “signed a resolution” giving the diplomat a new job and title of “State Secretary of the Union State of Russia and Belarus” in a move announced by the Kremlin.
“Another step toward imposing a real union,” said a former U.S. official who remains informed about issues in the post-Soviet space. “And a shot across the bow to the [European Union] that Belarus is not truly independent.”
The union state once seemed to offer Putin a path to circumvent constitutional term limits on his presidency, and one source suggested it still might do so despite his successful move to have legislative allies eliminate those term limits for him. “Putin’s hedge against stepping down as president of Russia,” the former U.S. official said. “He can always become president of the union if he wishes.”
With term limits changed already, it may be that Putin still hopes to absorb Belarus into Russia for his own ideological reasons and to boost his public image at home.
“Putin will certainly keep it in mind, the union state, if only [because] it’s one of the big cards for him,” the official said, recalling that Putin halted a multiyear decline in his own popularity by annexing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. “He sees himself as a restorer of the Russian Empire. … So, he would also very much would like to have a union state, not only [so] that it would extend his rule, but also to strengthen his role as Vladimir the Restorer.”
