Russia’s war games test its balancing act with Belarus
BELARUS: He is infamous for running Europe’s last dictatorship. But Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president, might also make a claim to being the continent’s most accomplished tightrope walker.
Now Lukashenko’s two-decade political balancing act between the Kremlin and the West is about to be tested like never before.
On September 14, thousands of Russian troops will fan out across the former Soviet state as part of one of the largest military exercises since the end of the Cold War.
Officially, the week-long drill, Zapad (West) 2017, is a friendly joint Russo-Belarusian exercise involving no more than 12,700 troops - just under the limit at which they would be obliged to invite foreign observers.
In reality, Zapad is occurring at the same time and in co-ordination with vast manoeuvres across western Russia - and Western military leaders are uneasy about the implications.
‘‘We are going to be watching very closely,’’ Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of Nato, said on Friday.
‘‘I call on Russia to ensure compliance with its obligations under the OSCE Vienna Document,’’ he added, referring to the treaty requiring foreign observers to be present at large exercises. The exercises are also controversial inside Belarus itself, with some fearing the Russian troops will refuse to return home afterwards.
Mykola Statkevich, a prominent Belarusian opposition leader, was jailed for two weeks yesterday for organising protests against them. ‘‘For 20 years we’ve lived with the breath of the bear on our necks,’’ said Statkevich, a former army officer and one of the few opposition leaders still in the authoritarian country, in an interview last month. ‘‘It impacts everything we do.’’
The Belarus exercise will include the 1st Guards Tank Army, a newly reconstituted armoured unit with a storied pedigree. Elsewhere, Russia is also expected to mobilise at least three airborne divisions, two army corps, and its Baltic fleet over a vast area including Moscow, the Arctic Kola Peninsula, and the exclave of Kaliningrad.
Add in air defence, aviation, and support elements, and you could be talking about a force in the region of 100,000 troops on the move, said Igor Sutyagin, an expert on the Russian military at the Royal United Services Institute.
Russia and Belarus say Zapad 2017 is a routine joint exercise that has been planned for years (there have been two previous such drills, in 2013 and 2009).
And there are legitimate reasons for Russia to practise what soldiers call ‘‘rapid strategic redeployment’’. With 12,500 miles of land border to defend, the ability to quickly move lots of troops a long way is crucial to Russian security.
But Moscow has a record of using such manoeuvres to mask more nefarious motives. In 2014, Russia used exercises in its southern Rostov region as cover for the annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine.
Some Western planners believe Russia may take the opportunity to practise Nato’s nightmare scenario: a rapid dash across Lithuania and Poland to link Belarus and Kaliningrad.
Such a move would cut the Baltic states’ only land connection to their other Nato allies, leaving Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania vulnerable to overwhelming Russian forces facing them from the Leningrad and Pskov regions.
In Minsk, the neat and tidy Belarusian capital, another nightmare is playing through officials’ minds: will their guests go home after the party is over?
Russia and Belarus are allies. Lukashenko’s 23-year old dictatorship is economically dependent on Kremlin largesse, and the slowdown of the Russian economy has been felt acutely.
The two countries are even part of a ‘‘union state’’ - an alliance that includes visa-free travel and mutual defence assurances. But since 2014, when Russian forces marched into Ukraine following a pro-Western revolution on the pretext of defending the Russianspeaking population, the embrace of the big eastern neighbour has felt a little smothering.
In 2015, Lukashenko released six prominent political prisoners, including Statkevich, in a bid to ingratiate himself to the European Union. The EU reciprocated the following year by lifting sanctions against his regime.
Meanwhile, the Belarusian minister of defence made a show of sending military officials to learn from Ukraine’s recent war fighting experience and has also invested in special forces and other branches of the military suited to resisting a Crimean-style ‘‘hybrid invasion’’.
Official suspicion of the Belarusian language - long seen as the preserve of the Westernleaning opposition and hence politically suspect - has given way to grudging encouragement. None of this means there is a major rift between Minsk and Moscow, but it does underscore the uneasy nature of Mr Lukashenko’s alliance with Mr Putin.
‘‘The biggest threat to him is not from the democratic opposition - it’s from the possible emergence of an alternative candidate who Putin would prefer,’’ said Artyom Shraibman, the political editor at Bel.by, the country’s main independent news website.
Whatever happens next month, Mr Statkevich warned that Western politicians should not be tempted to ignore Mr Lukashenko’s human rights abuses in exchange for a buffer against Russia.
‘‘If they think Lukashenko is going to defend their borders from Putin, that’s just funny,’’ he said. ‘‘In September we’ll see why. There are already 500 Russian special forces on exercise in Brest on the Polish border.’’
Belarus has invited observers from Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Sweden, and Norway to watch the exercises. Alexander Fomin, a deputy Russian defence minister, told state television last week that the drills were ‘‘routine’’ and ‘‘not aggression’’. - Telegraph Group