Russian PM Visits Minsk As Belarus Looks To Ally For Help

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin will visit Minsk as Belarus’s beleaguered authoritarian leader. Alyaksandr Lukashenka. pivots to Moscow to overcome weeks of protests and international isolation over an election widely viewed as rigged.

Unprecedented daily protests against Lukashenka since the August 9 vote are being closely watched in Russia, which for years has pushed for closer economic and political integration between the two ex-Soviet countries despite finding an often difficult and resistant partner in the Belarusian leader.

The protests and associated crackdown have also upended Lukashenka’s nascent rapprochement with the West, which the Belarusian president had used to balance ties with its much larger eastern neighbor.

During a visit to Moscow on September 2, Belarusian Foreign Minister Uladzimer Makey thanked Russia for supporting Minsk in the face of what he described as protests orchestrated from abroad.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, appearing alongside Makey, criticized “destructive” Western criticism of the Belarusian authorities.

Crisis In Belarus

Read our coverage as Belarusians take to the streets to demand the resignation of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka and call for new elections after official results from the August 9 presidential poll gave Lukashenka a landslide victory.

He said Moscow would respond “firmly and with dignity” to any attempts to destabilize Belarus or loosen its strong ties to Russia.

Lavrov also confirmed that President Vladimir Putin would host Lukashenka in Moscow “in the next couple of weeks.”

Separately, Belarusian Defense Minister Viktar Khrenin will visit Russia on September 4. Khrenin will take part in a meeting of defense ministers of post-Soviet countries, his office said in a statement.

Last week, Putin raised the possibility of sending military support if Belarus “starts to get out of control” and “extremist elements in Belarus cross the line and begin acts of looting.”

In the wake of the election, Lukashenka has mobilized the army, claiming NATO members are plotting a “color revolution” to topple him and planning to use Belarus as a geopolitical launching pad to undermine Russia.

Hundreds of thousands of citizens have taken to the streets across Belarus to protest the “rigged” results that gave Lukashenka more than 80 percent of the vote. The protesters are calling on Lukashenka to step down after 26 years in power, release all political prisoners, and hold free and fair elections.

Analysts say Putin is struggling with the difficult balancing act of calculating whether Russia can extract demands from an increasingly weak Lukashenka with its interest in not isolating a Belarusian public and opposition that is so far not hostile to Russia.

In an interview with RFE/RL on August 28, Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the self-exiled presidential candidate who has become an unlikely leader of the Belarusian opposition, said deploying Russian forces in her country would be a mistake.

“This is our internal problem, an internal issue that Belarusians must resolve with the Belarusian government,” said Tsikhanouskaya, who claims to have won 60 to 70 percent of the vote.

George Kent, U.S. deputy assistant secretary overseeing policy toward Belarus at the State Department, said at a conference in Washington on September 2 that the United States and its allies would have a tough response if Russia intervened in Belarus.

He said that if Moscow thought relations with the West the last few years had been bad, “it can get worse.”

Lukashenka’s government has “lost all legitimacy in the eyes” of the Belarusian people and it would be “catastrophic” for Russia’s image in Belarus to intervene militarily on his behalf, he said.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on September 2 that the United States was demanding an immediate end to the violent crackdown by Belarus’s government on opposition supporters and was in consultation with its transatlantic partners over a response.

The European Union has been working on a list of individuals to target with sanctions.

With reporting by AFP, Reuters, and RFE/RL’s Belarus Service