Could Belarus’s Aleksandr Lukashenko be the key to ending the Ukraine conflict? In a surprising intervention over the weekend, the long-time dictator and close Putin ally said in an interview on Russian state TV that ‘Nazis don’t exist on the territory of Ukraine’ – a key part of Putin’s stated war aims. He also called for negotiations to begin in order to end the conflict. Lukashenko claimed that ‘neither the Ukrainian people, nor the Russians, nor the Belarusians need [this conflict]’, adding that only the West wanted this war to continue.
His shift to a strong pro-peace line goes strongly against the current Kremlin signalling
Lukashenka has hitherto been a staunch supporter of Putin’s war, and indeed allowed Belarus to be used as a launchpad for the February 2022 invasion. But his shift to a strong pro-peace line goes strongly against the current Kremlin signalling, which is that in the wake of the Kursk incursion all peace talks are off and that escalation is now more likely than peace. Lukashenko’s claim that Ukraine has already been ‘de-Nazified’ undermines and directly contradicts one of the key Kremlin reasons for continuing the conflict.
Why is Lukashenko suddenly opposing the Kremlin’s party line? He’s certainly not suddenly reinvented himself as a peacenik. Lukashenka is notorious for torturing and imprisoning political opponents and owes his political life to Putin who sent armed support against massive protests that threatened to topple the Belarusian regime in August 2020.
Partly, Lukashenko is clearly nervous that the Kursk incursion will lead to a major escalation by Russia, up to and possibly including a full-scale war with Nato. This would put his tiny country of ten million directly in the firing line (Soviet Belarus lost more people, proportionately, than any other region during the second world war). He is also nervous that talk of Russia opening a ‘northern front’ against Ukraine could cause the flighting to spill over into Belarus.
Lukashenko has played the peacemaker before, hosting the talks that led to the Minsk Accords of 2014-15. He also acted as the middleman in the first inconclusive Russo-Ukrainian peace negotiations in Minsk in 2022. Before the Kursk incursion, there was a growing consensus both in western foreign policy circles and in Russia that that the war would come to an end this winter. Certainly, regardless of who wins the November presidential elections in the US, bringing an end to the Ukraine conflict will be close to the top of the new US administration’s agenda in January 2025.
The only logical starting point for any resumed peace talks are the ill-fated negotiations of March-April 2022 which came close to a deal in Istanbul but ultimately failed when the Kremlin overplayed its hand. Wherever the resumed talks take place – both locations of Istanbul and Minsk carry bad karma for the Ukrainians –Lukashenko and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan are likely to play a crucial role.
What is just as important as Lukashenko’s denial of one of Russia’s war aims and his call to resume talks, is the peculiar logic of his argument for ending the war. In saying that it’s only the West that wants this war to continue, Lukashenko is offering a potential ladder down which the Kremlin can climb without losing face.
In some ways Lukashenko’s argument that the fraternal Slavic peoples of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia would all just get along if it weren’t for the meddling West mirrors the Kremlin’s own messaging in the run-up to the invasion on February 2022. Putin had repeatedly claimed that Russians and Ukrainians are ‘one people’ who have historically been divided by interfering foreign powers. Russian state TV propaganda has also routinely cast the Kremlin’s ‘Special Military Operation’ as a kind of rescue mission to save Ukrainians from their western-backed Nazi leaders. Grotesque as that argument may be to Ukrainians who witnessed the horrors of Bucha and the ongoing nightly terror-bombing of civilian targets, it does resonate with many Russians who have family ties to Ukraine and bear no personal animosity to individual Ukrainians.
Lukashenko’s narrative that Ukraine has now been (somehow) de-Nazified and that continuing the war only serves the West is false and absurd. The path to war was paved with such lies. But the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu suggested building your enemy a golden bridge across which he can retreat. Could that bridge to peace be constructed of useful falsehoods, too?
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