Belarus using U.S. ties to push Russia for cheap energy deal
Ratcheting up pressure on Belarus, its closest but increasingly balky ally, Russia rejected pleas Friday from Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko for cut-rate supplies of oil, insisting that it could not provide any discount.
Lukashenko, emboldened by a visit last weekend to his country by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, pushed hard for cheap energy during what he called a “moment of truth” meeting in Sochi, Russia, with President Vladimir Putin, who has used Belarus’ dependence on Russian oil and gas to revive a moribund plan to merge the two countries.
But a senior Kremlin official, Dmitry Kozak, told journalists late Friday that Russia, which suspended oil deliveries to Belarus last month, could only offer standard commercial terms without a discount.
Russia seems to have offered some concessions on supplies of natural gas, with Kozak saying that favorable terms set in 2019 would continue for the moment. But its firm stand on oil increased pressure on Belarus to accede to demands by Putin that the two countries implement a long-stalled 1999 plan to unite their two countries in a “union state.”
Lukashenko, a past master at manipulating the East-West competition to his advantage, went into his meeting with Putin in the mountains above Sochi, a resort city on the Black Sea coast, gambling that Moscow had been spooked by his warming relations with Washington and might let up on the “union state” project while cutting Belarus slack on energy supplies.
The Belarusian leader has, particularly since Pompeo’s visit, taken an increasingly hostile view of any such amalgamation, even as he continued to vociferously demand the cutprice Russian energy he needs to keep his country’s sickly economy afloat.
The meeting got off to an inauspicious start when bad weather delayed the arrival of Putin’s team of ministers and advisers from Moscow. After a break for a game of ice hockey, talks resumed and dragged into the night.
Pompeo’s visit last weekend to the Belarus capital, Minsk — the first by a U.S. secretary of state since 1993 — lasted only a few hours. Nevertheless, his promise that the United States would finally fill an ambassadorial post left empty for more than a decade has given new energy to Lukashenko’s resistance.
In the buildup to his meeting with Putin in Sochi, Lukashenko unleashed a barrage of earthy insults directed at Russia and taunted Moscow over his improved relations with the United States visits.
Artyom Shraibman, a political commentator in Minsk, said Pompeo’s visit had done nothing to resolve Belarus’ principal problem — its reliance on Russia for supplies of cut-rate natural gas and oil — but was “symbolically very important for Lukashenko” as a sign of Western support for keeping Belarus an independent state.
In power since 1994, Lukashenko has long maneuvered adroitly between East and West, tilting one way and then the other in search of support. Denounced in 2005 by then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as the “last true remaining dictatorship in the heart of Europe,” Belarus remains an authoritarian country but is no longer an outlier in the region, especially when compared to Russia.
In January, after the collapse late last year of talks between Russia and Belarus over forming a “union state,” Russia temporarily halted deliveries of oil, prompting Belarus to buy a shipment of pricey oil from Norway and hunt for other suppliers.
“What we need is cheap oil and gas, not an ambassador,” said Maryna Rakhlei, a Belarusian expert on the region at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. Lukashenko, she added, “has very weak cards” but plays them aggressively in the knowledge that, no matter how strained relations with Moscow become, “geography will not change” and Russia is “not going to lose Belarus.”
Belarus’ relations with the United States and Europe have improved steadily in recent years, particularly since Russia annexed Crimea from neighboring Ukraine in 2014.