Belarus strongman is pushing his luck now

Once a regime has plucked a commercial airliner out of the sky to snatch a single journalist, its capacity to shock the rest of the world should theoretically diminish. And yet, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has managed. At home, he has brutally suppressed civil society and critics, with one would-be adversary from 2020’s presidential race sentenced to 14 years in jail. He’s weaponised migrants. He forced an Olympic athlete to flee after she dared criticise a sporting decision, and put an opposition leader on trial behind closed doors, even as a high-profile diaspora activist was found dead under suspicious circumstances in a Ukrainian park.
A year after a disputed election that triggered unprecedented street protests, Lukashenko hangs on to power. Yet his increasingly erratic and outrageous tactics speak to his diminishing options — and to the impossible position he has put the country in. He has backed a nation of more than nine million at the heart of Europe into political and geographic isolation, squeezed by economic sanctions and dependent on neighbouring Russia like never before.
The Soviet-lite regime is lurching toward the end. Just don’t expect a swift finish. A former collective farm boss, Lukashenko has run Belarus for nearly three decades, enjoying enviable stability thanks to repression and cheap Russian oil. That was becoming harder to sustain even before last year, as the state-dominated economy stagnated, growing less than 2% annually on average over the past decade.
The botched handling of Covid-19 made matters worse: Lukashenko’s dismissal of the illness as “psychosis” and promotion of quack cures fueled support for the opposition. When he sought to claim his sixth election victory anyway, he met the ensuing public outrage with a merciless crackdown. Since then, all dissenting voices have either been forced abroad — as with opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who ran in her jailed husband’s stead — or put behind bars. The suppression has been enough to limit defections among high-ranking officials and to keep security services in his camp, and the ensuing silence that has made Lukashenko confident enough to push out the uncomfortable question of eventual retirement.
Crucially, Moscow’s support has also not wavered. The two remain stuck in an uncomfortable dependence. Lukashenko needs cash and the Kremlin has yet to find a reliable alternative. His stunts may not even be unhelpful to Moscow as a distraction from its own ruthless efforts to silence critics. As Nigel Gould-Davies, a former British ambassador to Belarus now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, described it to me, Lukashenko serves Russia’s interests by preserving a non-aligned, pro-Russian, authoritarian state on the Western border, and it’s not clear any other future leader that is not democratically elected would be seen as any more legitimate.
The trouble for Lukashenko is that he has achieved not peace or stability, but an uneasy stalemate. He will struggle to sustain the current level of repression in a crumbling economy, but also can’t ease his grip. Every post-Soviet leader who lived through perestroika has seen the dangers of tinkering with an autocratic system around the edges.

—Bloomberg