Here is how to play great-power politics when you are the dictator of a country with a population of 9 million. First, lock up a lot of people, attracting attention and creating leverage. Second, make yourself a regional nuisance, for example, by enabling illegal migration or disrupting aviation with balloons. Third, offer deals to superpowers that need success stories. Fourth, sit back and enjoy the result.
That is what Alyaksandr Lukashenka (using the Belarusian transcription for his name) does. Belarus this weekend freed 123 prisoners, including the Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski and prominent opposition activist Maria Kolesnikova, in return for the lifting of sanctions on the vital potash industry. President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Belarus, John Coale, who brokered the deal, said (rather vaguely) that Belarus also agreed to stop sending balloons into Lithuania. These have led to repeated costly and inconvenient airport closures there. “Belarus agrees to stop doing what they said they weren’t doing,” noted the former Estonian president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves.
On a human level, the prisoner release can only be welcomed. As the London-based analyst Katia Glod observes, “These are people who endured years of imprisonment, isolation and deliberate cruelty for refusing to submit. They became moral reference points for Belarusian society. Their release brings immense relief to their families and serves as a reminder to others that survival itself can be an act of resistance.” The effect inside Belarus is harder to measure. As Glod notes: “Lukashenka understands that carefully calibrated mercy can exhaust hope just as effectively as repression can crush it. Giving society a moment to breathe is not the same as giving it space to act.”
The new exiles will boost the divided, ineffective, and increasingly unpopular Belarusian opposition abroad. Those exiles settling in Lithuania may wish to learn from the mistakes made by previous arrivals. It is a good idea to learn a bit of the local language, and not to treat your host country as a historical anomaly. The Kremlin’s efforts to drive a wedge between the Vilnius-based Belarusian opposition and their Lithuanian hosts have been troublingly successful.
But the opposition’s allies are in wider disarray too. The West punished the repressive Lukashenka regime with sanctions in 2004 (the European Union) and 2006 (the US). These have enjoyed, to put it mildly, only limited success. The deal with the US may count as a success for the parties involved. But it does not mark a humanitarian breakthrough or the start of political liberalisation. Those freed are swapping prison for exile. Thousands of people remain in detention, mostly in harsh conditions. More can easily join them. Dissent is criminalised, justice is arbitrary, elections are rigged, and the media is muzzled.
Far from being forced to change, Lukashenka is celebrating. Since he first appeared on the political scene in 1993, as an outspoken anti-corruption campaigner (how times change…), outsiders, including me, have mocked the former collective-farm director for his earthy, incoherent speech, provincial worldview, and flagrant nepotism. Ridiculous? Perhaps. But who is laughing now? Lukashenka has cannily managed both domestic stability and international relations, while his foes and rivals flounder. Belarus is Russia’s most important ally, yet has stayed out of the Ukraine war. The authorities in Minsk have also flirted with China (albeit with more symbolism than substance). And now the mighty United States is promising to lift more sanctions in return for efforts to “normalise” relations.
This is not just a humiliating setback for European efforts to treat the Belarusian leader as a murderous pariah. It is the harbinger of something much more sinister: a broader US-Russian rapprochement, sacrificing principles and allies alike.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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