President Alexander Lukashenko will almost certainly use his country’s accession to the Eurasian multilateral grouping as a pretext to carry on inundating Poland and the Baltics with irregular arrivals.
In early July, existing members and dialogue partners of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) convened in Astana for the organisation’s 24th annual summit. Kazakh President Kassym–Jomrat Tokayev was determined to go beyond the signature pomp and pageantry associated with these events and ensure that his country’s rotating chairmanship actually counted for something before passing the torch to China.
Sadly, the most substantive outcome that emerged from the two-day conference was bringing Belarus—an international pariah and US-designated state sponsor of human-trafficking—into the fold on its independence day and just a few weeks prior to Lukashenko marking three decades at the helm.
- How the Kremlin uses agriculture to undermine the West and advance its political agenda
- In Belarus, an election in name only
- In parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, autocracy and weak justice systems are enabling widespread corruption
Having deduced that his regime was too far gone to reconcile with after the Belarusian strongman rigged an election in August 2020 and cemented monarchical rule, the European Union took its gloves off and effectively blockaded the continent’s “last dictatorship” to protest the stolen elections.
A double-edged sword
The sanctions onslaught against Belarus has, nonetheless, proven to be something of a double-edged sword. While pan-EU trade embargoes together with transport bans have crushed its export-oriented economy and left Lukashenko licking his wounds, he now finds himself eating out of Vladimir Putin’s hand and reliant on Kremlin largesse for self-preservation.
Pursuing near-term rapprochement remains a lost cause, not only due to Russia’s hostile takeover of Belarus but also because the latter’s illegitimate leader acts on impulse and engages in all kinds of buffoonery without thinking the ramifications—diplomatic or otherwise—through.
The Minsk Regional Court’s recent decision to sentence German social worker Rico Krieger to death on trumped-up, terror-related charges just days after Lukashenko launched a renewed tourism push and loosened entry protocols for citizens of 35 European countries illustrates how divorced from reality his entire administration is.
Also worth recalling is that national airline Belavia—one of Belarus’ biggest revenue generators prior to the Covid-19 pandemic—has practically been on life support ever since its landing slots were abrogated and planes prohibited from flying over EU airspace in response to the 2021 Ryanair Flight 4978 hijacking.
Lukashenko is, in many ways, the architect of his own isolation and has some serious soul-searching to do. However, knowing that an already thinly-stretched Moscow could start to see him as a financial burden and abandon him on the side of the road if Minsk refuses to become embroiled in the Ukraine war, he is back knocking on Brussels’ door.
Though clearly a day late and a dollar short in seeking to normalise EU-Belarus relations with token goodwill gestures such as pardoning eighteen political prisoners on medical grounds as well as exonerating Mikalai Kazlou—chairman of the banned opposition United Civic party, Lukashenko’s “come to Jesus” moment suggests that the walls are closing in on him. Meanwhile, offering to help Poland defang the migrant influx he orchestrated in the first place is merely an extension of his “arsonist playing firefighter” chicanery and a politically expedient attempt to depict himself as the adult in the room.
Another bottomless pit
The same line of reasoning can be applied to his sudden withdrawal of troops from the Ukrainian border. Make no mistake, Lukashenko is angling for a lucrative gatekeeping gig akin to the 2016 refugee pact struck with Türkiye that allowed President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to extort and rob the EU blind in exchange for stemming the outflow of millions of Europe-bound Syrian asylum seekers. By warehousing a critical mass of would-be interlopers on Belarusian territory, the former collective farm boss plans to accrue similar leverage over Brussels with one last roll of the dice and replicate his Turkish counterpart’s brinksmanship.
To avoid funnelling obscene sums of European taxpayer money into yet another bottomless pit, it is imperative that Poland, Lithuania and Latvia be given free rein to patrol their frontiers with Belarus as they see fit rather than have the European Court of Human Rightsand various human rights watchdogs breathing down their necks.
The guardrails currently in place to shield trespassing, and oftentimes aggressive, aliens from forcible “pushbacks” have reduced border police stationed along the EU’s Eastern flank to sitting ducks and resulted in the fatal stabbing of 21-year-old Polish soldier Mateusz Sitek on May 28 by an African migrant.
As Putin and Lukashenko inch closer to establishing a de jure Union State, there could be a spillover of undesirables—including furloughed prisoners, naturalised mercenaries and indentured guest workers—from Russia into Belarus.
According to the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, more than 90 per cent of the illegal migrants entering his country of late were in possession of Russian visas. The bulk of them are fleeing puritanical and godforsaken hellscapes like Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Eritrea that the Kremlin has forged marriages of convenience with to create a NATO-style “one for all, all for one” security architecture.
An irritant for Europe
Despite the blowback these unholy alliances have elicited in the form of surging homegrown terrorism, Putin is so ideologically-driven that he continues to whistle past the graveyard and compromise public order in Russia for the “greater good”.
After all, his multipolarity project is a numbers game and the more countries he has onside, the greater the prospect of dislodging America as the world’s “sole hegemon”. For that reason and as a means of further consolidating the “anti-colonial” movement led by Russia and China, an unwieldy BRICS-SCO amalgamation looks set to come to fruition and make for a perfect storm.
Most of the nations that constitute SCO are hotbeds for mass emigration. Belarus joining the regional entity as its westernmost member and fostering “cross-cultural exchanges” with the Global South will be a major irritant for the Eurocrats.
Nationals of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have been advised by their governments against travelling to Russia amid rampant xenophobia towards Central Asians. The Schengen Area could become their new El Dorado, with Minsk serving as a springboard to get there. Even inhabitants of China and India—which boast a collective population of three billion and faster-growing economies than the OECD average—are on the move.
Equally concerning is the extent to which Belarus’ relationship with Iran has blossomed in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Besides contending with runaway inflation and “gender apartheid”, Iranian commoners can no longer take internal stability for granted as the Israel-Hamas conflict intensifies and risks permeating to the wider region.
An easy sell
By virtue of its proximity to the EU, Belarus is an easy sell to those desperately in search of an escape route and prepared to part ways with their life savings for the sake of settling down elsewhere. At the same time, the IRGC will not hesitate to dip their toes into a clandestine scheme they stand to profit from handsomely from and collude with Lukashenko to propel this exodus.
Needless to say, Putin is running down the clock on US President Joe Biden in the hope that Republican nominee Donald Trump’s “24-hour” negotiated settlement will entail Volodymyr Zelensky acquiescing to a raw deal and ceding captured territory.
Lukashenko too has a dog in this fight as Trump’s hard-line stance on unlawful immigration will render Europe a more attractive option for budding refugees and give his people-smuggling racket a shot in the arm.
The hybrid attack waged by both agents of chaos is stress-testing the EU’s all-hands-on-deck resistance and resolve. A Merkel-esque “willkommen” approach to this manufactured humanitarian crisis would be suicidal for a bloc plagued by institutional rot and at its wits’ end with uncontrolled migration.
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