“Unprecedented political pressure and sanctions from the so-called collective West is pushing us to speed up merger processes,” Vladimir Putin said on July 1 at a forum in the western Belarusian city of Grodno, a stone’s throw from the European Union’s borders. “Because together, it will be easier to minimize the damage from illegal sanctions” imposed on Russia and Belarus by the West, Putin said. A week earlier, his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko urged the leaders of other ex-Soviet nations to move closer to the “union state” of Russia and Belarus – or face losing their independence. “Today, the nations of the post-Soviet space must be genuinely concerned about their rapprochement with the Union state – if, of course, they want to maintain their sovereignty and independence,” he told a video camera. “Those who hesitate must understand – without faster unification and rapprochement, stronger interstate ties and simple human relations, tomorrow we may not be anymore,” said Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994 and whose re-election bids have been tarnished and more than violence against his opponents and protesters. In the late 1990s, Lukashenko was keen to merge his former Soviet nation of 9.2 million with Russia – and signed an agreement to create a “union state” with a common constitution and parliament. The former collective farms manager, nicknamed “Bat’ka” (Dad), hoped to succeed alcoholic Russian President Boris Yeltsin, whose mental and physical condition was rapidly deteriorating. Yeltsin, however, anointed Putin, a general intelligence chief, as his successor in 1999, and Lukashenko put the brakes on the merger. But he continued to milk the Kremlin, taking multibillion-ruble loans, discounted gas, trade preferences and benefits for Belarusian migrant workers. Russia’s support has helped Lukashenko, who has long been called “Europe’s last dictator”, keep his head up politically and financially, especially as the West has imposed sanctions on Minsk for a heavy-handed crackdown on the opposition and critics. Lukashenko continued to look for margins. He tried to wean his economy off profits from state collective farms, chemical factories and a huge oil refinery that used cheap Russian crude. Defying the image of an ex-communist official with a Chevron mustache and a heavy peasant accent, he created the Belarus Hi-Tech Park, a Belarusian “Silicon Valley” where tens of thousands of IT engineers developed impressive software and startups. But the IT sector has shrunk since the boiling point in 2020, when hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets to protest his sixth re-election. They clashed with the police and staged strikes – but Lukashenko’s law enforcement agencies responded with violence, torture, arrests and prison sentences. Tens of thousands left Belarus, including many IT specialists, mostly for neighboring Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine. Lukashenko backed himself into a corner and Moscow remained his only supporter – while the Kremlin continued to press him to finalize the merger. Russian officials remembered all too well how Putin’s approval ratings soared to a stratospheric 88 percent after Moscow’s previous “takeover” – Ukraine’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
USSR revived?
For some observers, the merger is a done deal. They see it as part of Moscow’s plans to announce the revival of the truncated copy of the Soviet Union this December. “The issue has been resolved in light of the USSR’s centenary in December 2022 and Putin’s plans to create a ‘third empire’ that would [succeed czarist Russia and the USSR and] include Belarus,” said Kiev-based analyst Aleksey Kushch. “What is happening now is just a technological step to prepare public opinion for this act,” he told Al Jazeera. But other analysts say Lukashenko is still trying to push back. “Lukashenko is in a bad corner, but he seems to be resisting the final solution,” Pavel Luzin, an analyst based at the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, DC think tank, told Al Jazeera. While Putin’s remarks on the merger are an opportunity to boost his approval ratings in Russia, Lukashenko’s State of the Union words are nothing more than a “wake-up call” to the West, a Belarus-born observer said. “Lukashenko’s words are more of a danger signal [other] nations, mainly in the EU – you are pushing us closer to Russia,” Igar Tyshkevich, who is based in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera. And when it comes to the Belarusian public, unification is far from popular. In July 2021, the number of Belarusians who strongly supported it rose to nine percent from five in 2020, according to the latest independent survey on the issue conducted by Chatham House, a British think-tank. 11 percent of respondents wanted Belarus and Russia to have a “single market with a single foreign policy and military,” and about a third supported a “single market” and a “free trade zone,” according to the poll. “With such dispositions, it is difficult to do a merger,” Tyshkevich said. Even if Belarus’s state-backed media supported the idea, it would hardly change public sentiment as only a quarter of Belarusians rely on these channels, he said. “No matter how hard-hitting your propaganda is, if 75 percent of the population isn’t watching it, you have no mechanisms to sway those people’s opinion, even if your propaganda is genius,” Tyshkevich said.
