Belarus opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has accused president Alexander Lukashenko of brokering a truce in Russia that increases the security risks for its European neighbours.
Lukashenko mediated a deal over the weekend allowing Wagner warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin to move to Belarus after agreeing to put an end to his day-long insurgency that posed an unprecedented challenge to Vladimir Putin’s grip on power in Russia.
But that agreement “escalates the domestic Russian conflict to our territory” and “makes Belarusians hostages of Russia”, Tsikhanouskaya told the Financial Times.
“If Prigozhin comes to Belarus with his thugs, it will bring threat to our neighbours too — Poland, Lithuania, Latvia,” she said. “The role of Belarus is growing. And the world must pay more attention to our country.”
Lukashenko’s mediation on Saturday, which ended an unprecedented march on Moscow by Wagner forces, consolidated his status both as a western pariah and Putin’s staunchest ally. The strongman’s intervention came just over a week after Russia announced that it had deployed tactical nuclear missiles in Belarus.
Moscow and Minsk are claiming that the Belarus leader played a crucial role in ending the biggest crisis of Putin’s presidency. The Kremlin in particular has played up Lukashenko’s participation as a proactive dealmaker. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday that Lukashenko offered to lead negotiations with Wagner, which Putin accepted.
“President Lukashenko stated in a phone call with president Putin on Saturday morning that he could try to help find a peaceful solution to this situation,” Lavrov said, “and avoid the large amount of blood which would have inevitably been spilled if the battalions of insurgents had continued moving towards Moscow.”
Prigozhin on Monday broke his two-day silence and published an audio note in which he denied having intended to topple the Russian government. Instead, he said, his march was an act of self-defence after having come under attack from the armed forces.
“We were marching to demonstrate our protest, not to unseat the government,” he said. He did not elaborate on his whereabouts or whether he would actually go to Belarus.
Moscow has emphasised that Lukashenko had known Prigozhin for two decades.
But some analysts are casting doubt on the Kremlin’s overall narrative about what convinced Prigozhin to stand down — at least for now. While Putin managed to avert a broader domestic conflict, the mutiny was a personal humiliation and unprecedented show of dissent at his war in Ukraine.
Belarus provided a launch pad for Putin’s all-out attack on Ukraine, hosting missile launchers and some of the Russian troops that advanced towards Kyiv in February last year. As a result, the EU increased its sanctions against Minsk. The office of Ukraine’s general prosecutor recently said that it was investigating the involvement of Belarus in the Russian-led abduction of children from Ukraine.
For much of his three decades in power, Lukashenko has sought to blend his allegiance to Moscow with occasional openings to the west. He also portrayed himself as a mediator in an earlier chapter of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when Belarus hosted unsuccessful talks in 2014 and 2015 to end the fighting in the Donbas region.
But Lukashenko’s balancing act largely ended with his brutal crackdown on demonstrators who denounced his re-election in 2020, which was declared fraudulent by the US and EU. The following year, Washington and Brussels put further sanctions on Minsk after it forced a Ryanair flight to land in Belarus in order to arrest an anti-Lukashenko activist who was on board.
Lukashenko’s intervention to halt the Wagner mutiny was also an unexpected return to centre stage for an authoritarian leader who had recently appeared to face health problems.
Analysts in Minsk suggested that Lukashenko’s help to Putin showed that he was still capable of wielding significant influence beyond the borders of Belarus, after a long period in which he had appeared simply to cave in to the demands made by the Russian leader.
“The most important implication of Lukashenko’s mediation is that he does preserve a good degree of agency,” said Yauheni Preiherman, director of the Minsk Dialogue think-tank.
Lukashenko’s support for the invasion of Ukraine has put his country under increasingly heavy western sanctions. The EU has is debating whether to further strengthen its sanctions regime against Belarus.
Tsikhanouskaya, who is now based in Vilnius, said it was “high time” for the west to push through stronger sanctions, as well as clearly state that all Russian forces must leave Belarus immediately.
“The whole world saw that Putin is not almighty,” she said. “It launched irreversible processes within Russian elites. Which is also good for Belarus. Without Putin, Lukashenko will not survive.”
Additional reporting by Polina Ivanova in London