Lukashenko Is Acting Suspiciously Again

He promised to attend the next Peace Board meeting despite the US humiliating him by refusing to grant his representatives visas to the inaugural one that he couldn’t attend, insists that the US “never intended” to divide Belarus and Russia, and might soon be invited to the White House or Mar-a-Lago.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko promised in late March after his most recent meeting with US Special Envoy John Coale that he’ll attend the next Peace Board meeting after claiming that he couldn’t attend the inaugural one due to a snap inspection of the military that he conducted back then. His representatives were humiliated by Trump, however, after the US didn’t grant them visas. It was analyzed here that Trump already sees Lukashenko as his vassal and is treating him accordingly.

That analysis also argued that the real reason why he didn’t attend was to avoid having to proverbially kiss Trump’s ring like his Kazakh counterpart predictably ended up doing and thus having the optics exploited to exacerbate the perception of growing differences between him and Putin over the US. On that topic, Russia had earlier warned Belarus about the West’s Color Revolution plans four years in advance of their 2030 execution date, which was analyzed here as a message from Putin to Lukashenko.

It was assessed that Belarus’ radically changed perception of Poland the month prior is the result of growing US influence over Belarus throughout the course of their talks, which a prior analysis here from last summer posited are aimed at dividing-and-ruling Belarus and Russia. The US’ interest in this is self-evident, which is why it was doubly suspicious that Lukashenko also claimed after his most recent meeting with Coale that the US “never intended” to attempt this.

Shortly afterwards, Coale confirmed to the Financial Times that “The US is looking at inviting Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to meet with Donald Trump at the White House or his home in Mar-a-Lago”, though he cautioned that “We’ve still got a lot of work to do to get there”. Importantly, their latest meeting saw Lukashenko pardon 250 more prisoners convicted of what the US considers to be “political crimes” in exchange for the US removing more sanctions, thus continuing a pattern from last year.

As it stands, the Belarusian-US rapprochement been more tangibly successful than the Russian-US one, which stalled after last August’s Anchorage Summit. This suggests that the US is more interested right now in repairing ties with Belarus than with Russia, which lends credence to the earlier-cited analysis that the US intends to divide-and-rule them and correspondingly discredits what Lukashenko claimed about how the US “never intended” to attempt this. None of this is good from Russia’s perspective.

To be sure, they’re still economic and military allies within a Union State, but it does indeed appear as though the US is now pressuring Russia along the Belarusian and Kazakh fronts as part of a new encirclement strategy aimed at coercing concessions from it in Ukraine. This observation doesn’t imply that the US will succeed with either of them, let alone both, but just that it’s indeed making a power play against Russia in its two most important neighbors. Russia therefore has reason to be concerned.

What the US wants is to provoke an overreaction from Russia that ruins its ties with Belarus or convince Lukashenko into defecting, either scenario of which could then lead to him ordering the removal of Russia’s tactical nukes and hypersonic missiles, thus making Belarus vulnerable to invasion. Lukashenko must therefore tread very carefully in his talks with the US, fully coordinate everything with Putin, and never forget that it was Russia that helped save Belarus from the West’s 2020 Color Revolution.