Belarusian opposition leader and political novice Svetlana Tikhanovskaya has a long list of hurdles to overcome if she wants to become the next democratically elected president of Belarus.
One is suspicions that she has ties to the Kremlin, while another appears to be an arrest warrant issued by Russia Wednesday and obtained by the Washington Examiner.
“No surprise. She has not been playing [the] Russian card since the election day,” Marius Laurinavicius, a Russia security expert at the Vilnius Institute of Political Analysis, told the Washington Examiner Wednesday.
“Moscow supports Lukashenko. So, it’s very natural,” he added of the move by Russia to seek her arrest on undisclosed charges.
Tikhanovskaya’s office in Vilnius did not immediately respond to a request by the Washington Examiner for comment about the arrest warrant.
In a recent interview in Vilnius, Laurinavicius made the case that Moscow actually used Tikhanovskaya, who formed a trio of three women opposition leaders as part of a “project” to weaken Lukashenko.
That project later backfired when Lukashenko violently cracked down on protesters, who have been marching every weekend in the capital of Minsk since the August election.
“Russia has a goal to weaken Lukashenko,” Laurinavicius explained of the 26-year dictator who is dependent on Putin but unwilling to be too subservient.
“Lukashenko started to act too independent,” he added. “They needed to change the situation into one which Lukashenko is weakened, but not replaced.”
The analyst pointed to the Russian business ties of Tikhanovskaya’s husband, Sergey, who became an anti-government blogger and presidential candidate.
“He lived and all of his business was in Moscow,” Laurinavicius said. “And then in 2019, he returned to Belarus, just stopped his business and became a blogger. Do you believe such transformations?”
Sergey Tikhanovsky was locked up by Belarusian authorities in May.
That’s when Svetlana, a stay-at-home mother, stepped forward to take his place and is believed to have defeated Lukashenko in fraudulent Aug. 9 elections before she fled the country to join her children in Lithuania.
Laurinavicius said Moscow sided with the three female leaders Tikhanovskaya, Maria Kolesnikova, and Veronika Tsepkalo, when its principal picks were barred from running.
Tikhanovskaya is now in exile in Lithuania, Tsepkalo is in exile in Poland, and Kolesnikova is jailed in Minsk.
With Russia and Belarus so intricately tied economically, culturally, and politically, Laurinavicius made the case Tikhanovskaya would cater to Russia in order to defeat Lukashenko.
“It’s not necessarily that Svetlana was handpicked by Moscow,” he said. “It might be the decision of Svetlana and people around her.”
‘Just come to the mirror’
In a Washington Examiner interview with Tikhanovskaya at her office in downtown Vilnius prior to the arrest warrant, the exiled opposition leader and democracy advocate explained her position on relations with Russia and whether or not she, in fact, is a Putin plant.
“It’s what propaganda said,” Tikhanovskaya said with a laugh. “Absolutely not.”
Tikhanovskaya said her husband decided to run for president because the Belarusian people asked him to.
“He was blamed by authorities, by Mr. Lukashenko that he was led by Russia … directed by Russia,” she said.
Tikhanovskaya said money was planted in her husband’s home, and there were claims that he was involved in the July presence of 32 Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a private security company known to be operating on behalf of Russian interests in Ukraine, Syria, and Libya.
She said her husband’s interests were altruistic.
“This is why he started to investigate what’s going on in Belarus, why people are so poor,” she said. “This is why we started to be involved in this. And I was involved in this by fate because I ran for the presidency instead of my husband.”
That’s when Belarusian authorities started to spin a story that she was a plant.
“They started to blame me that I [was] directed from [the] West,” she said.
During the course of the interview, Tikhanovskaya made clear that she did not view the question of free and fair elections in Belarus as a geopolitical one between the West and Russia. Tikhanovskaya hopes Moscow will still support dialogue and that economic ties between Russia and Belarus would continue in a post-Lukashenko country.
“Honestly, in Belarus, if you are looking for the Kremlin, you’ll find it everywhere,” Vilnius University professor and Belarus expert Vytis Jurkonis told the Washington Examiner Wednesday.
“That’s a legacy and the heritage of Lukashenko’s regime. Certainly, the Kremlin is the last place on earth which really wants the Belarusian people to win, because that would be a very powerful signal to the Russian population.”
Russia commentators say Putin cannot allow Lukashenko to be overthrown by street protesters, lest Russians try to reject him similarly.
Tikhanovskaya said her husband remains in a Minsk prison where he can be beaten or placed in a punishment chamber at any time for the most trivial reason. The warrant means she could be arrested if she were to return to Belarus, just some 20 miles south of where she is staying in Vilnius.
Meanwhile, Tikhanovskaya continues to grow international recognition, meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel Tuesday.
Laurinavicius admits that the internal conditions in Belarus were ripe for an opposition candidate to pose a challenge to Lukashenko.
Before the August elections, the economy was struggling and Lukashenko did not only dismiss out of hand the threat posed by COVID-19, he insulted those who were dying.
Putin’s miscalculation to support opposition candidates became apparent when street protests were violently put down.
“It was a miscalculation from Moscow,” said Laurinavicius, who believes Putin had no idea Lukashenko would crack down on election protesters so aggressively.
Jurkonis assessed that Lukashenko’s mistakes had reached a tipping point.
“Arrogance, thinking that things would work the way they used to work, like having the repression, intimidation, like torture and shooting at the people, that would scare people, not this time,” he said.
Tikhanovskaya said Lukashenko is trying to create a diversion in blaming her or her husband for ties with Russia.
“Who’s the reason of this political crisis? It’s not [the] West, it’s not Russia. Just look, it’s just you,” she said of Lukashenko.
“Mr. Lukashenko always was trying to blame somebody [for] what’s going on inside our country,” she said. “To understand who is the reason of this crisis, just come to the mirror and look in it.”
