Why you should care about Belarus

WASHINGTON — Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who was derided three years ago in the British press as a “housewife with no political experience” — even though she claims to have won the 2020 disputed presidential election — has been a fast learner.

Last month she flew to Washington, where she met with Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his Democratic predecessor, Nancy Pelosi. Tsikhanouskaya sat down with Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Isobel Coleman, deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Throughout the short but busy trip, Tsikhanouskaya’s message was emphatic and consistent: “The war cannot be over until Belarus is free,” as she put it in a conversation with Yahoo News.

She and other Belarusians argue that it is a mistake to see Belarus as nothing more than Russia’s junior partner in the war against Ukraine. They say the country’s first and only president, Alexander Lukashenko, does not represent ordinary Belarusians, who have seen their yearning for democracy ruthlessly suppressed throughout his long tenure.

They argue that the West has no less responsibility to help realize those yearnings than it does to help Ukraine retain independence. “We can’t, of course, be a huge trade partner for the USA,” Tsikhanouskaya told Yahoo News. “You can’t get a lot of profit from Belarus. But the fight for universal values is important.”

Why is Belarus important?

A landlocked nation roughly the size of Kansas, with a population on par with New Jersey's, Belarus (Belarussia, or “White Russia,” in Russian) is wedged like a boulder between Russia and Ukraine, sharing thousands of miles of border with those two warring neighbors but also with Poland, Latvia and Lithuania — three NATO members that have come to Ukraine’s defense.

During the late Soviet era it was widely derided — at least among the power elite in Moscow and Leningrad — as an underdeveloped backwater of little cultural and political significance. Although the Chernobyl nuclear explosion in 1986 took place on Ukrainian soil, the radioactive cloud quickly blew north across the border and into Belarus, in what was an all-too-apt symbol of its fortunes.

Today Belarus is the rare ally of Russia in Europe, and a crucial one at that. In the opening days of the war, Moscow’s forces invaded Ukraine from Belarusian territory, launching a failed assault on Kyiv from the north.

“Without Lukashenko, this war would not even be possible,” Valery Kavaleuski, a top deputy in Tsikhanouskaya’s shadow government, said during a recent conversation with reporters in Washington, D.C. “He enabled this.”

Who is Alexander Lukashenko?

A former Communist Party functionary, Lukashenko came to power in 1994, promising improved living standards and a crackdown on corruption. Those promises were made, and broken, all over Eastern Europe, but nowhere more thoroughly or devastatingly than in Belarus. Within two years, Lukashenko had dissolved the Parliament and passed a referendum arrogating greater powers to his own office.

“Belarus is either going to fall into a kind of neo-Soviet dictatorship or it will establish a basis for building a modern state,” a Western diplomat warned a Washington Post reporter as those changes were being disputed in Minsk. "Right now, it's impossible to tell which."

Today there is little question which direction Lukashenko took. The more power he claimed, the more power he sought. “Arrests on political grounds continue in Belarus, newspapers are still being shut down and the private sector of the economy is rapidly shrinking,” Radio Free Europe reported the following year.

In 1999, Lukashenko pushed to forge a new alliance with ailing Russian leader Boris Yeltsin. He may have even perceived that chaos in the Kremlin would redound to his benefit and that it would be he who would, in time, rule over a combined Russian-Belarusian state.

The two leaders did sign a “union” treaty in 1999, but the agreement did not reestablish the Soviet-style proximity Lukashenko had sought. And he was plainly discomfited by the signing ceremony, at which Yeltsin — then in the advanced stages of alcoholism — was likely inebriated.

Three weeks later, Yeltsin resigned. He named as acting president a charmless former KGB officer unknown to most Russians: Vladimir Putin.

Whatever designs Lukashenko had were eclipsed and frustrated by Putin’s rise, which saw Moscow reassert itself, however clumsily, as a superpower. In 2002, Putin rejected a full merger with Belarus — to which the 1999 agreement had been a supposed preamble — in what the Guardian would describe as “a crushing humiliation for Lukashenko.”

His consolation prize was to remain a dictator flanked on one side by new Eastern European democracies and on the other by an increasingly revanchist and belligerent Russia. Lukashenko’s dismissive approach to the coronavirus pandemic only underscored how isolated Minsk has become from the rest of the continent.

The war in Ukraine brought Minsk and Moscow into a tight embrace while isolating Belarus from the rest of Europe.

Lukashenko’s subordinate status was made clear in the months leading up to the invasion, as Russian troops gathered on the Belarusian border, hoping to quickly conquer Kyiv, only 100 miles to the south. Although there are no Belarusian troops fighting for Russia, the Kremlin has used Belarusian territory as a kind of staging ground for troops and equipment, as well as field hospitals.

When Putin suggested that he might place nuclear weapons in Belarus, Lukashenko embraced the possibility.

“We see Belarus tacitly supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told Yahoo News in March.

That support may not mean a lot to a Kremlin that sees Lukashenko as little more than a minion, an insignificant figure in a grandiose pan-Slavic project.

Yahoo News recently revealed a Kremlin document outlining Russia’s plans to subsume Belarus into its borders by 2030. Some fear it could happen sooner and that, if the war in Ukraine continues to fare badly for Putin, he might take Belarus as a “consolation prize,” according to Kavaleuski.

To resistance figures like Tsikhanouskaya, as long as Lukashenko is in power, Ukraine will live under a threat. “Without a free Belarus, there will be a constant threat to our neighbors,” she said. “Nobody will be able to sleep peacefully.”

Do the Belarusian people want democracy?

Throughout his three decades in power, Lukashenko has imitated Putin’s ruthless silencing of opponents and the free press.

The State Department describes Belarus as an “authoritarian state” and accuses Lukashenko of “human rights abuses,” including “arbitrary or unlawful killings” of dissidents, as well as “deaths from torture or severe abuse.”

After Tsikhanouskaya's husband, an opposition journalist, was arrested ahead of the 2020 presidential election, she decided to enter the race herself.

“People demanded free and fair elections,” Kavaleuski says, bristling at the notion that Belarusians were content to live in a dictatorship.

An astonishing 84% of Belarusians voted in the election. Lukashenko allegedly won with 80% of the vote; the mass protests that followed suggested that Tsikhanouskaya had good reason to believe she had been cheated out of her share of votes. Poll workers widely described the election as fraudulent.

“Belarus is at a crossroads, and no one knows how the situation will play out,” Kennan Institute scholar Igor Zevelev observed. “At this moment, at least one thing is crystal clear: This is a beginning of the end for President Alexander Lukashenko’s rule.”

Fearing for the safety of her children, Tsikhanouskaya fled to Lithuania. She has not been back to Belarus since.

Three years later, she remains defiant about the race. “I know that Belarusian people voted for me,” she told Yahoo News. “People voted against Lukashenko, and I was the only person who tried to oppose him.”

Earlier this year, she was tried in absentia for treason and given a 15-year prison sentence.

What do the Belarusians want from the West?

The sanctions levied against Belarus in the early days of the war by the United States and European powers inextricably tied the fates of Minsk and Moscow. Belarus, like Russia, came to be seen as an enemy of freedom, democracy and peace.

“Of course, we advocate for as much military support for Ukraine as possible,” Kavaleuski told Yahoo News. He worries that many Ukrainians mistake the corrupt aims of the Lukashenko regime for the will of the people. “Overnight, we turned from freedom fighters to backstabbers in the eyes of the Ukrainians,” he laments.

Today, a Belarusian regiment fights in Ukraine — for Ukraine. Belarusian saboteurs have also tried to hamper the Russian war machine. That is proof, the opposition argues, that Belarusian aspirations are firmly in line with those of their Ukrainian neighbors to the south, not their Russian neighbors to the north and east.

Now, the opposition says, it’s time for the West to recognize as much. “Showing solidarity and support for people who are fighting for freedom is a moral obligation,” Tsikhanouskaya told Yahoo News, arguing for a kind of domino theory of Eastern European autocracy.

“Tyranny is like a cancer,” she says. “It starts in one country and spreads.”

What does Washington say?

After Lukashenko’s last electoral victory, the United States ceased to recognize the legitimacy of his regime. His support of Putin’s war has seen a new round of sanctions on Belarus levied by Europe and the United States.

Tsikhanouskaya and her allies say that if the Biden administration believes in democracy as deeply as it claims, it must do more to bring democracy to Belarus.

So far, they have struggled to make that case convincingly, at least in Washington.

“Ultimately, this is for the Belarusian people to decide,” Kirby of the NSC told Yahoo News in response to a question about how the Biden administration could further the democratic aspirations of Belarusian citizens.

It may have been a disappointing answer, but it is one that reflected American realities as much as Belarusian ones. Belarus is, after all, a sovereign country. Already involved — albeit not directly — in Ukraine, the United States can do little to effect change in Ukraine’s pro-Russia neighbor, much as Washington would love to see the Lukashenko regime collapse.

Tsikhanouskaya says her meetings in Washington were encouraging, with U.S. officials vowing greater cooperation with the opposition. Ultimately, though, only Lukashenko’s departure will bring about the kind of change she and others hope for.

“Democracy is difficult,” she concedes. But after 30 years of despotism, Belarusians are ready to give it a try.