By Brian Whitmore
Alyaksandr Lukashenka has gotten himself into a tight spot.
Like his masters in the Kremlin, the Belarusian autocrat was counting on a quick and decisive Russian victory in Ukraine. Lukashenka apparently calculated that aiding, abetting, and facilitating Vladimir Putin’s aggression would pay off for him.
By allowing Putin to use Belarusian territory as a staging area for Russian troops and as a platform to launch airstrikes against Ukrainian cities, the dictator in Minsk hoped that a grateful Kremlin leader would shower him with aid and let him remain in power.
Lukashenka, of course, calculated wrong. Instead of a rapid and triumphant campaign, Russia’s blitzkrieg has turned into a quagmire.
As Putin shifts the focus of the war away from taking Kyiv and toward gaining complete control of the Donbas region in the east of the country, the platform Lukashenka provided Putin to attack the Ukrainian capital is no longer so useful. According to Ukrainian military intelligence, “all battalion tactical groups that have so far been amassed in Belarus, near our northern borders, are now redeployed to eastern Ukraine.”
If Moscow no longer relies on Belarus for its invasion, one has to wonder how much longer Lukashenka himself will be seen as useful by the Kremlin. “The Belarusian dictator understands this well, and therefore he tries to prove to the Russian leadership and Putin personally that he is needed,” political analyst Pavel Usov wrote in a recent commentary for Deutsche Welle. “Lukashenka understands that the main resource supporting his political survival is serving the Kremlin’s domestic and international agenda.”