The Belarusian opposition, led by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, is forming an alliance with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in an attempt to stymie any hopes Russia may have of territorial expansion beyond Ukraine and further into Europe.
The fear is that Russian President Vladimir Putin will be in Belarus as he is in Ukraine, and hopes to wrap Belarus in Russia itself, Valery Kavaleuski, the Belarusian opposition leader’s foreign affairs representative, told The Daily Beast.
“The Russians look at us the same way they look at Ukraine,” Kavaleuski said. “This is a state that depends temporarily. This is the country that doesn’t deserve to be on Russia’s side, so everyone has to be. “Russified. ” This is their fundamental understanding of how the world works.
For months, considerations have been developing in European countries of Putin invading countries other than Ukraine. Some fears have grown about Putin’s interest in attacking the Baltics, Poland or even the United Kingdom and the United States.
And a foray or seizure of power in Belarus, in theory, can facilitate Putin’s power to Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.
“When you look at the map, you see that those are essentially the most important countries on Russia’s path to Western Europe,” Kavaleuski told The Daily Beast. Democratic Belarus and Ukraine deserve a job largely in combination with the “serious risk to our state. “in both countries,” he said.
It is unclear whether Putin has any plans on Belarus in the short term. Belarus’ relations with Russia are complex: the U. S. State Department is not yet in the process of Russia. The U. S. military assessed earlier this year that it is unclear where Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s strength ends and Putin’s strength begins. Moscow and Minsk have established what they call a “union state,” in which each year the two countries merge their banking, military and other sectors.
This year alone, Lukashenko has allowed Russia to penetrate and use Belarus as a launching pad for attacks on Ukraine, adding to the failure of the effort to capture Kyiv at the beginning of the war.
In recent weeks, Belarus and Russia have applied to launch a joint military organization and are conducting live-fire training in Belarus. Lately, Russia is sending around 9,000 troops and armored vehicle loads to Belarus for deployment, just as Russia faces mounting losses. in Ukraine, Belarusian defense officials said.
But Tsikhanouskaya, who ran for president in 2020 in opposition to Lukashenko and is internationally identified as the valid representative of the Belarusian people, reads between the lines that Lukashenko is not a wife equivalent to Putin and has almost completely ceded her strength to Moscow. His judgment is that the time has come to turn a new page into the future, a page on which Lukashenko is not necessarily valid.
“Belarusians are equivalent to Lukashenko. Lukashenko is a shame for my country. It is he and Putin who are dragging our country into war. Lukashenko is no longer the decision-maker, it is the Kremlin,” Tsikhanouskaya said in her proposed alliance for Zelensky.
Tsikhanouskaya noted in comments earlier this month that recent battlefield losses could weaken Lukashenko, giving a window to pro-democracy Belarusians.
“We have a distracted Russia that is about to lose this war. It will not be able to with Lukashenko with cash and army as in 2020,” he told the Warsaw Security Conference.
Ukraine and its team are teaming up for “joint action” in the future, he said.
“We propose to build an alliance with democratic Belarus,” Tsikhanouskaya said in her proposal. “I am convinced that Russia will be defeated and Ukraine will repair its territorial integrity and protect its independence. Ukrainians are now writing not only their history, but also that of the world. . . We are in a position to act jointly with Ukraine.
The alliance will concentrate on building close relationships in spheres, from social relations to economic, military and diplomatic, his team told The Daily Beast. Kavaleuski said his team would be interested in the security promises Ukraine is also striving to obtain.
Forming an alliance is likely to be the next herb-based step, Scott Rauland, a former project leader at the U. S. Embassy in Belarus, told The Daily Beast.
“Zelensky would be interested in making common cause with the Belarusian opposition. They have a common enemy,” he said Rauland. Se faced similar degrees of repression by Russia in other ways, but the trend is largely the same.
And if Lukashenko were ever ousted from power, it would be imperative to reject Russian influence, Rauland said. Tsikhanouskaya and her team “would be in a position to serve as a transitional government that Lukashenko would leave. “he said.
Tsikhanouskaya is on the same page. In August, she and her team created a transitional executive body, the United Transitional Cabinet, with the aim of centralizing her team’s efforts to create flexible elections and “ensure the transition of force from dictatorship to democracy. “
The Belarusian opposition expects a quick reaction from Zelensky’s management on the possible partnership, Kavaleuski said, and his team suspects that the immediate formation of such an alliance may be seen by Lukashenko as a provocation.
“The Ukrainian government is now very, very cautious about communicating with democratic Belarus, it fears that those contexts will drive Lukashenko’s invasion,” Kavaleuski said. “We perceive it as a region, so we take our time. Because we perceive that the stakes are high.
Zelensky’s workplace did not respond to a request for comment.
Lukashenko has warned in recent days that he considers the activities and association of neighboring countries with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to be competitive and provocative, with an eye on Poland and Ukraine.
Ukraine has maintained a defensive line near the Belarus-Ukraine border, acknowledging that Belarus could potentially launch an attack on Ukraine from the north.
But from the point of view of the Belarusian opposition, there is room to think.
“Even if we don’t have the resources of the state, we have the legitimacy of the Belarusian people, we have the legitimacy of the foreign community, and if we have the diplomatic political matrix of Ukraine, we can now do much more for Ukraine and for our own country,” Kavaleuski said.