Vladimir Putin has a proven skill for surreptitiously playing the arsonist and then offering his services as a firefighter.
In Ukraine, he started a war in the Donbas and then managed to get Russia recognized as a mediator in a conflict where it was both instigator and combatant. In Syria, Russia’s intervention on the side of Bashir al-Assad not only prolonged and exacerbated that war; it also bought Russia a seat at the table in negotiations over its resolution.
Is Putin about to pull off the same trick with Belarus in the aftermath of the hijacking of Ryanair Flight 4978 and the kidnapping of passengers Raman Pratasevich and Sofia Sapega? The issue is certain to come up when Putin meets US President Joe Biden in Geneva on June 16.
“It is possible that the result of the US-Russian summit may be that the Kremlin receives a degree of carte blanche to interfere in the internal affairs of Belarus in order to resolve the political crisis without any international consequences, including in the form of sanctions from the West,” Arsen Sivitsky, director of the Minsk-based Center for Strategic and Foreign Policy Studies, wrote recently.