Russia has granted Belarus a stay in repayments on loans to the tune of $1 billion and issued a new loan for another $1.5 billion. Rather, the relationship between the two ageing dictators seems to be in its honeymoon phase. It is difficult to find any examples of Putin exerting pressure on Lukashenka in recent months. It is more likely, however, that both Minsk and Moscow are quite happy with their current arrangement – or that they know they have no card to play. This has given rise to a creeping delusion in the West that Belarus’s leader, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, has some kind of mythical resistance to Putin’s pressure. But they have so far remained steadfastly in Belarus.
Ever since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, rumours have swirled about the imminent entry of Belarusian troops to the fighting. It is too early to label this attempt a ‘failure’ but the expectations seem ambitious to say the least.Īt the same time, Putin may still have one more card up his sleeve: the Belarusian army. Now, the Russian regime is trying to mould a “ second army of the world” from hundreds of thousands of undertrained civilian conscripts. Its military commanders have tried ‘blitzkrieg’ and the ‘salami-slicing’ approach they honed in Syria, but to no avail. Beyond nuclear rhetoric, “dirty bomb” blackmail, and terrorising civilians, the Kremlin seems to be out of ideas. The Russian armed forces have squandered their stocks of both missiles and professional military manpower. The Ukrainian armed forces are liberating occupied territories and conducting sabotage operations against Russia-controlled targets – allegedly including Putin’s beloved Crimean bridge. Vladimir Putin is running out of conventional cards to play in Ukraine.
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