Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko acknowledged that he may have remained in power “for a bit too long” following weeks of mass protests against his regime.
“Yes, perhaps I’ve sat [in the presidential chair] for a bit too long, maybe. I’m shown not only on TV, but on irons and kettles as well,” Lukashenko told Russian journalists, according to state-run media.
That unusual acknowledgment of domestic dissatisfaction with his rule comes almost exactly one month since Lukashenko claimed to have received 80% of the vote in the Aug. 9 presidential elections, which were widely perceived as fraudulent. The strongman, who has ruled the former Soviet vassal state since 1994 and has blamed the outrage over the elections on Western powers, maintained that he must remain in power in Minsk, Belarus’s capital.
Despite the admission, Lukashenko claimed if he were to fall now, then “the entire system will fall, and the entire country will follow suit.”
“And these guys, riot police officers and the rest who stand with me … what are they guilty of? But they will be cut up and slaughtered,” he said, according to Belarusian state media.
The interview took place as United States officials attempt to broker a political process to resolve the crisis, including high-level overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is Lukashenko’s most important patron.
“What we have [to do] right now is to try to persuade Lukashenko that he cannot be the president of a country under these circumstances,” said Ambassador Jim Gilmore, the U.S. envoy to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “He thinks that a fraudulent election followed by brutal suppression of the people is good enough.”
Lukashenko and Putin have dismissed a council established by Belarusian opposition officials as an extraconstitutional political body unworthy of negotiating with Lukashenko’s team. The Belarusian autocrat’s Russian media interview was published hours after two opposition leaders were expelled from the country to Ukraine. A third was detained after she “tore up her passport and escaped from the car in which the three were being expelled,” according to a report that cited an opposition spokesman on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-backed outlet.
Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun met with Belarusian opposition leaders in Lithuania last month before traveling to Moscow, a trip undertaken in part to warn Putin not to conduct a major military operation to prop up Lukashenko.
“The greater [the] degree to which Russia affiliates with a leadership and a regime which has lost all legitimacy in the eyes of the Belarusian people, they risk losing some of that affinity,” the State Department’s George Kent, one of the lead U.S. diplomats for Europe, said last week while remarking on Russia’s traditional popularity in Belarus. “A military operation would be catastrophic to the image of Russia in Belarus.”
Such denunciations of Lukashenko, spurred by a brutal crackdown on protesters in the days after the election, represent a substantial course-correction for American officials. President Trump’s administration has spent the last 18 months reaching out to Lukashenko in an attempt to prevent Putin from tightening control over Belarus and increase his capacity to threaten neighboring NATO and American allies in Europe.
Lukashenko, for his part, has pivoted to arguing that the political crisis in Belarus is a portent of the stability of Putin’s power in Moscow.
“You should not feel complacent,” he told the Russian interviewers, according to state media. “Do you know what we, together with the Russian establishment and authorities, have come to? If Belarus collapses today, Russia will be next.”
