Europe’s last dictator: Lukashenko’s fate depends on Ukraine

A young man wearing combat fatigues and an extravagant moustache, and carrying a heavy machine-gun over his shoulder, nods towards some burned-out armoured vehicles. ‘We smashed the orcs today,’ he says, using the Ukrainian soldiers’ term for the invading Russians, a reference to the sub-human legion in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He goes on: ‘Putin, you are a dickhead – your Greater Russia will die together with you.’ The soldier – his uniform has a badge saying ‘Ivanov’ in Cyrillic – is not, in fact, Ukrainian. He is one of a small number of volunteers from Belarus, next door, a country that is certainly part of the Greater Russian project. But if Ukraine pushes back the Russian invasion, it is just possible that Belarus, too, could slip from Vladimir Putin’s grasp.

Ivanov is speaking on a video released by the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Battalion, named after the young lawyer, journalist and revolutionary who led a 19th-century uprising against the ‘Muscovite empire’. Kalinoŭski’s small band of rebels were overwhelmed by 120,000 well-equipped Russian troops and he was publicly executed at the age of 26. In the battle for Ukraine today, the Kremlin’s plan was also to overwhelm the opposition with a larger, better-equipped force. Ivanov says he is not afraid of attacking the Russian army even though he and his comrades have so little to fight with – just one tank and two ‘BMP’ Soviet-era armoured vehicles between them. ‘We are a free people. We have nothing to be afraid of. We are fighting for truth. As you can see, victory is ours.’

The Kalinoŭski Battalion was formally incorporated into the Ukrainian armed forces last month, but it still flies the red and white flag of the pre-Soviet People’s Republic of Belarus. Their motto is: ‘First Ukraine, then Belarus.’ The idea that the volunteers could turn around one day and march back to liberate Minsk is a bit fanciful: there are probably just a few hundred of them fighting in Ukraine.