Rattled Putin is running out of options as protests rage in Belarus

Belarus is classic borderland, marcher territory. It is a place of “crossed destinies”, to borrow from Italo Calvino, and is now Europe’s prime home of bad options. After more than three weeks of demonstrations against a highly disputed presidential election – to put it mildly, Alexander Lukashenko, clown prince of East European autocrats, is clinging on to power.

The breaking news is that there were yet more demonstrations by the ten thousand in the capital and elsewhere over the weekend. The protesters aren’t backing down. The police were, if anything, more numerous on the streets, and slightly tougher in their tactics. A patrol of armoured personnel carriers – not tanks – drove into town in what was little more than a standard photo opportunity in combat fatigues.

Mutterings of support from Russia for its junior partners in Minsk have continued. So far at least, there has been little sign of legions of Russian Federation police reserves coming across the border. Lukashenko has stood firm, and in his personal photo ops has struck a pose remarkably like Benito Mussolini, head back, chin thrust out, reminiscent of Berthold Brecht’s Arturo Ui as much as il Duce.

However, according to EuroNews, he spoke yesterday with the head of the constitutional court – floating the idea of a national referendum on constitutional reform. It could be anything or nothing. But it is reminiscent of the manoeuvrings of the authorities in Algeria last summer. Faced with mass demonstrations by thousands, and occasionally hundreds of thousands, the old elite of Le Pouvoir also offered mild electoral reform and a referendum on constitutional changes. Alexander Lukashenko might be reading the Algerian playbook, paying lip service to superficial reforms while consolidating his own position.

After 26 years in control, his regime is in trouble, hit by recession, compounded by the Corona virus pandemic. Against him, the demonstrations and protests have been adroit. The leaders haven’t said they want to join Nato, the EU or even the West, and are manifestly not being guided by a plot from distant lands. Almost as a matter of course, Lukashenko has claimed that legions and cohorts from Nato and the EU are massing on the border – for which there is no evidence whatsoever.

One of the Nato neighbours, Lithuania, has been beyond mild in its response – merely moving military observers to the border.  The government of Lithuania raised the mildest protest when Belarus Mi8 helicopters crossed the border to pop some large balloons flying the colours of the protesters. Of course, Lithuania is also hosting Sviatlana Tsikhanovskaya, the presidential opposition candidate, after she said she was forced to flee for the safety of her young family.

The trickiest roster of bad options is now on the desk of Vladimir Putin, nominal ally and sponsor of the Lukashenko regime. The two don’t get on, apparently, because Lukashenko compares his own personal rise from being an obscure manager of a soviet style pig cooperative to supreme power to that of the President of the Russian Federation – which the latter resents.

Support, both moral and practical, from Moscow has been minimalist. When national television journalists walked out in Minsk, replacements were sent from Moscow to help get the television news out. This has been followed by suggestions, surprisingly vague under the circumstances, that Mr Putin would consider sending in reinforcements from a Russian Federation reserve police force if “things turned really violent” on the streets.

The police reserve ploy turns out to be largely at the suggestion of the embattled Mr Lukashenko himself. The idea of a pan-federation police reserve was agreed as part of the friendship pact and security alliance between Minsk and Moscow. Though Belarus won independence from the Soviet Union when it collapsed at the end of 1991, it has never left the side of whoever is on the throne in the Kremlin. Putin’s response to the police idea is understandably tinged with embarrassment.

President Putin knows, for him personally and for Russia, it invites a breech of the oldest military maxim in the book: never reinforce failure.

Meanwhile, the protesters continue to protest – on occasion in numbers of 100,000 at a time. Lukashenko plays soft cop and hard cop, clown and thug. Initially, he tried to play down the effects of both Covid and the demonstrations. He said the answer to one, if not the other, was “to drink Vodka, got to the sauna, go back to the land, drive tractors.”  More protesters are beaten up, and rounded up by the score, but not, as yet, by the hundreds. Ominously, some have disappeared.

Members of the Opposition Coordinating Council have been rounded up, and some detained. Latest to be hauled in for question is the Nobel Laureate for literature of 2015, Svetlana Alexievich. This is an unusually provocative and pointless exercise, given the nature of the opposition movement and their demands.

They are not calling for revolution – merely demanding a rerun of the elections in a free, fair and transparent exercise of democracy. This must be scaring some of Putin’s team to death – given the traction it is gaining on social media. There are too many outbreaks of demands for real democracy right across his vast empire and in the marchlands like Belarus. This pattern of unsympathetic vibrations for the Kremlin, and which runs from the Baltic to the Pacific, is one of the reasons why the EU-Nato Baltic allies are keeping relatively shtum.

“It’s very different this time,” a friend, who had served at the highest level in Nato, explained to me the other day. “This is not one of the colour revolutions, with a strong political programme or ideology.

“You can see a very different approach in different parts of Nato, in the North Atlantic Council, representing a wide range of regional and political views. And between the outlooks of Nato as an alliance and the EU. The EU members, particularly of the East, do not want any close involvement with Belarus that would bring more unwelcome influence of Russia and Russian political culture into the Union.”

Initially the mistake of the international journalistic commentariat was making predictions based on the recent past – as if history contains the prophetic magic some policy makers now attach to algorithms. The crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks in 1968 has been cited, and even the suppression of Hungary in 1956, as precedent.

Mercifully, there has been little of the bizarre grandstanding from the time of the Russia’s war with Georgia over Ossetia in 2008, when the likes of David Miliband, then foreign secretary of the UK, spoke of the right of Ukraine and Georgia to join Nato. The practicalities of how this might be done, let alone the damage caused by such an empty promise, were barely considered.

Now we are in the era of non-obvious warfare, asymmetric conflict by stealth, such as we have seen in Crimea and the Donbass in Ukraine. This is a cautionary tale for Putin and his planners. Ukraine got out of hand when he had to rescue his erstwhile protégé Viktor Yanukovych after he was forced out by popular and violent protest in 2014. Putin will try to avoid having to stage a last-minute helicopter evacuation for Alexander Lukashenko.

Putin is faced with bigger problems from an outbreak of protest and democracy across the sprawling Russian Federation. Khabarovsk towards the border with China has seen protests every day for more than a month following the defeat of the Putin United Russia governor of the region. Sergei Furgal of the socially conservative, nationalist Liberal Democratic party – LPDR – won by a landslide 69.6 per cent of the vote. On July 9 Furgal was arrested, and taken to Moscow to face murder charges relating to events 15 years before.

On July 20 the Kremlin appointed another LDPR member, Mikhail Degtyaryov, 39, as the replacement governor in Khabarovsk. It didn’t work. The new man was from the metropolitan west, an import. These candidates and functionaries are known collectively as “Varangians”, from the Vikings who first came from the north west to raid and loot through the great Russian river systems.

The Varangians epitomise the attempt by Moscow from the beginnings of Putin’s reign to run the Russian Federation top down from the Kremlin. The response to such control freakery from the protesters in Khabarovsk has been shouts of “Death to the tsar.”

The day before the Khabarovsk vote, Putin’s United Russia party lost another governorship election in Vladimir Oblast, less than 150 miles east of Moscow. It has lost again Khakassia in eastern Siberia.

On September 13 elections for dozens of regional parliaments are to be held, and 18 governors are to be chosen. Some 15 of the current incumbents are Putin appointees, outsiders and “Varangians.” Opinion polls and surveys are not looking good for team Putin. Next year the entire federal parliament in Moscow is due for election.

Given the rising level of protest across the Russian Federation, Putin’s ability to manage and control will be severely tested. In Arkhangelsk, due to choose a new governor this month, environmental demos about landfill sites have been running more than a year now.

Much of the mistrust in the east is attributed to the failure to distribute wealth earned from lucrative gas and oil deals with China. Protest and grumbling developed at what was seen as Moscow’s bungling in the initial stages of the Corona virus continues, but is hard to factor.

The poisoning of the popular opposition leader Alexei Navalny, 44, in Siberia last week is yet another indication of Putin’s increasing nervousness about political protest. Navalny had been campaigning for the upcoming elections in Siberia. The nature of toxins now identified by German medics in Berlin suggest a direct link with attempted poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury two years ago.

It is the same cocktail, seemingly, used against a Bulgarian arms dealer helping the nationalist against Moscow in Ukraine in, called Emilian Gebrev. The Bulgarian state prosecutors charged three operatives from Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency in absentia for the crime, committed in 2015. One is named as Sergey Fedotov.

Later, the Bellingcat investigative reporting agency unmasked Fedotov as Denis Sergeyev, a major-general in the GRU. He was in London in March 2018, Bellingcat has revealed, and very likely directing the two GRU agents who tried to kill Sergei and Julia Skripal with Novichok in Salisbury, and did kill Dawn Sturgess, albeit by mistake.

“These things never happen without being signed off at the top, and I mean the very top in the Kremlin,” Luke Harding of the Guardian, author of the brilliant “Shadow State” explained to be about the Navalny hit. 

Mr Putin seems unusually, almost uncharacteristically, nervous about the recent outbreaks of democracy and protest across his neighbourhood. But the democratic deficits of Lukashenko’s crackpot dictatorship sit pretty low down his list of priorities, compared with what is happening in the home backyard, pending this month’s elections.

So, I don’t think the tanks will be rolling into Minsk from Moscow very soon. And Mr Lukashenko shouldn’t bet on an imminent visit from the friendly neighbourhood Russian Federation Reserve Police Force.