Belarus is fast becoming a ‘vassal state’ of Russia under Lukashenko

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — Schools give patriotic lessons and teach students how to assemble rifles, while textbooks have been rewritten to favor Russia’s view of history. Factories produce uniforms for soldiers fighting Ukraine. Summer camps run by state-owned conglomerates host children from occupied Ukrainian territory.

These by-now familiar scenes would hardly bear mention in wartime Russia, except that these were drawn recently from Belarus, an autocratic country of 9.4 million neighboring Russia, Ukraine, and the NATO members Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. Long uneasily in the orbit of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Belarus is increasingly doing his bidding, socially, militarily, and economically.

The most recent manifestation of Belarus’s fealty to Moscow — and the threat it poses to the West — is its professed decision to allow Moscow to position tactical nuclear weapons on its soil, as well as outfitting its bombers with nuclear weapons. It is also an important step, democracy advocates and military experts say, toward Russia’s absorption of Belarus, a longtime goal of Putin.

“Belarus’ sovereignty is evaporating very fast,” said Pavel Slunkin, a former Belarusian diplomat who is now a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Any sphere you take, Russia’s control has become extremely big and it’s increasing.”

It wasn’t always this way. Throughout the post-Cold War era, the country’s authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, played a clever game, professing loyalty to Moscow and championing the Soviet slogans of “brotherhood and unity,” while making sure that relations with Moscow never got too close to threaten his hold on power. He even reached out occasionally to Western nations eager to draw Belarus closer to Europe economically.

That arrangement developed cracks in 2014, after Russia seized Crimea, raising the alarming possibility for Lukashenko that Belarus, too, could be swallowed by its larger neighbor. Putin reinforced those fears by speaking openly of a political union of the two states.

But it collapsed entirely in 2020, when Lukashenko cracked down on hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy protesters, making him an international pariah. At that moment of peril, Putin stepped in, providing cheap energy, an economic lifeline, and an implicit assurance of security assistance, should that become necessary.

With Belarus a virtual dependent of Russia, Lukashenko has become a crucial partner in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, stopping short only at contributing his own military to the fight.

Pavel Latushka, a former Belarusian diplomat and minister turned dissident, has published evidence that Belarus is complicit in the forced displacement of Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied territory. Prosecutors from the International Criminal Court in March issued arrest warrants for Putin and his children’s rights commissioner accusing them of deporting thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia.

Latushka said he discovered documents signed under the auspices of the “Union State,” a vague alignment of Russia and Belarus, that ordered the movement of Ukrainian children that has been carried out.

"The decision is signed personally by Lukashenko," who currently chairs the supranational body's leadership council.

The apparent positioning of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus is also part of agreements made in the Union State, though the Kremlin has said all of the nuclear materials will be under Russian control. The nuclear weapons are a source of pride for Lukashenko, who thinks they will “give him the ability to stay in power until his death,” said Latushka.

But they also give Moscow a monopoly of force that diminishes the Belarusian strongman’s control, bring Russia inside Belarus’s borders, and pose a potential threat to Belarus’s security — all points that the government’s opponents are trying to drive home to Belarusians.

“We are now ringing all the bells about the deployment of nuclear weapons, which ensures Russia’s presence in Belarus for many years to come,” said Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Belarus’s primary opposition leader, now in exile.