Belarusian Officialdom and Opposition-in-Exile Fight for Self-Preservation
The news of Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei’s sudden death has, for now, overshadowed all other news coming from Belarus. Exactly two years ago, Makei’s deputy Oleg Kravchenko also died from a sudden heart attack. Both Makei and Kravchenko used to be the major champions of rapprochement between official Minsk and the West. As a result, conspiracy theories have proliferated regarding Makei’s death, which does not necessarily mean anything as the work environment for both officials was indeed stressful. Just on November 22, Makei flew to Yerevan, Armenia, aboard a military transport aircraft. The next day, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka joined him at the summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which did not go smoothly due to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
The thrust of Lukashenka’s speech at the summit was devoted to Minsk’s upcoming (in January 2023) chairmanship of the CSTO. The Belarusian president underscored the importance of the CSTO’s strategic dialogue with China and heralded two prospective Minsk-based conferences (President.gov.by, November 23). The first will be devoted to Eurasian security and involve officials from the CSTO, Commonwealth of Independent States, Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the United Nations. And the second will devise strategies for confronting “disinformation” emanating from the West and is expected to involve the CSTO members and their national institutions that deal with strategic studies.
Lukashenka has a habit of deviating from his official script, thus regularly offering tidbits that the media subsequently pounce on. This time, he chose to react to the ongoing informal discussions on how the outcome of Russia’s war against Ukraine will affect the CSTO’s future. Reportedly, the talk of the town is that Russia’s defeat would lead to the CSTO’s demise. “I feel,” acknowledged Lukashenka, “that we have come to a common opinion that, if, God forbid, Russia collapses, then we will all be buried under the rubble. … So, such discussions should not even take place. … The CSTO will exist, and nothing will collapse it” (President.gov.by, November 23). Those reading between the lines will extract from this pronouncement whatever fits their agenda, with a palpable uncertainty about the war’s outcome being the most obvious takeaway.
In the meantime, the leader of the Belarusian “democrats-in-exile,” Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, declared in a recent article that she is the true president-elect of Belarus (Svaboda, November 15). While allusions to Tikhanovskaya’s victory in the August 2020 elections have abounded ever since, she has yet to make such public pronouncements herself. As such, commentators rushed to interpret the significance behind her statement. According to Artyom Shraibman, nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Tikhanovskaya launched a trial balloon intended exclusively for Western audiences, whose attention the opposition leader and her entourage have successfully claimed thus far. The new declaration seeks to boost that attention to a potential severance of Western ties with the “regime” in Minsk and treating Tikhanovskaya as the sole representative of Belarus.
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