All is not quiet along Belarus’ border

The Memorandum | No. 04.2024

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On 6th June 2024, the Armed Forces General Command of Poland made the sombre announcement that Mateusz Sitek had succumbed to his injuries. Just over a week before, during his deployment near the frontier village of Dubicze Cerkiewne, a migrant of unknown origin stabbed the 21-year-old private with a knife. Details are sparse, but Polish news media have speculated that the attacker must have used the weapon through a gap in the barrier that Poland had erected along the frontier to prevent Belarus from pushing migrants into Polish territory.

Sitek’s killing is a vivid reminder of the crisis which has gripped this borderland since the spring of 2021. Over the course of that year, while Russia was preparing its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Belarusian authorities lured unsuspecting individuals, mostly from the Middle East, on the false promise that they could transit legally into the European Union (EU). Upon landing at Minsk National Airport, these migrants would receive visas and then board a bus headed to Belarus’ western frontier. They would be told to cross into the neighbouring EU country – be it Latvia, Lithuania, or Poland – where they were left to their own devices.

Belarus stranded those migrants, often physically forcing them to traverse the border illegally. The crisis was most intense in November 2021 when the three North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) countries all had declared a state of emergency, with Poland deploying 15,000 troops to the border with Belarus. The Polish Border Guard reports 17,000 attempted crossings so far this year. Over 100 Polish officers have suffered injuries since 2021.

Sparking some controversy for refusing to process migrants as international law requires, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland have built land fences and extensive surveillance systems to deny them the ability to cross into their territory. Moreover, once aware of what Belarus was doing, several Middle Eastern countries discontinued their air routes to Minsk. Those actions have blunted Belarus’ cynical weaponisation of migrants, which ostensibly serves to punish those three NATO countries for their support of the political opposition following the presidential election which Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus, appears to have lost.

Still, the challenge on the border remains. Much of it comes from Lukashenko and his regime. The tendency among many observers is to portray the boorish Belarusian president as an idiot who exists simply to serve the dictates of Vladimir Putin, President of Russia. Lukashenko may be devoid of erudition, but he has successfully held onto power since the early 1990s. He weathered the deep political crisis in the summer of 2020 by coup-proofing his hold on power and using excessive force without hesitation. As much as Lukashenko has largely subordinated his country to Russia, particularly in the areas of foreign and defence policy, he has not mired it in an extremely costly ground war as Putin – a man of apparently superior intelligence – has done.

Unfortunately, the Euro-Atlantic community continues to underestimate the importance of Belarus for European security and, by extension, the ruthless cunning of Lukashenko. Many writings on the eastern flank after Russia’s annexation of the Crimea barely mentioned Belarus on the implicit assumption that its sovereignty was already curtailed and territorial integrity a legal fiction. Even after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24th February 2022, Belarus’ participation in the ground war seemed for many imminent despite the lack of readiness of the Belarusian armed forces, the difficulties of the marshy terrain that they would have to traverse, and serious doubts about the reliability of the Belarusian rank-and-file.

And so, despite everything which has happened since 2020, much of the collective Euro-Atlantic world ignores Belarus. When Belarus does hit the headlines, misunderstanding abounds. Thankfully, the matter is straightforward, though perhaps not in the same way as suggested by popular understandings of Russia’s ally.

The first to note is that Lukashenko is more popular among Belarusians than people like to believe. To be sure, he would very likely lose a free and fair presidential election (again). Many members of civil society who would oppose him have fled, if they are not already in prison or closely watched. Still, one survey conducted in November 2021 indicated that he would still receive almost a third of the vote, placing him second to Viktor Babaryka. Although Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who leads the opposition in Belarus, has done an admirable job in publicising the Belarusian democratic opposition, she would receive far fewer votes than Lukashenka in a multi-candidate ballot.

The second is that as much as Belarus barely registers in the news headlines, Lukashenko and his government have not given up on putting as much pressure as they can on the EU and, for that matter, NATO. Sitek’s killing and the ongoing migrant crisis are, sadly, the best evidence of this strategy put in practice. Recent security documents released by the Belarusian government – for example, its new National Security Concept – have taken on a decisively anti-Atlantic and confrontational tone. That the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has gone about joint military exercises with Belarus near the Polish border in early July must be an additional cause for concern, not least because it is evidence that Beijing has become more audacious in its willingness to test, and perhaps to undermine, the European security order.

The third is that Ukraine’s own attitude towards Belarus is at best ambivalent. One might think that Kyiv would throw its weight behind the democratic opposition in view of how Russia has used Belarus as a staging ground for various military operations directed against Ukraine. However, Ukraine does sense that differences between Belarus and Russia are large enough to warrant a more nuanced approach. After all, surveys show that Belarusians are themselves very divided about how they feel about Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine.

From the perspective of the United Kingdom (UK) and other NATO allies further afield, the bottom-line is to treat Belarus seriously enough as an actor in its own right. Minsk has become more hostile and far more willing to engage in coercive tactics that put pressure on NATO’s eastern flank. It cannot be ignored. It is not, and does not need to be, Russia’s puppet to cause problems for Europe.

Though the Euro-Atlantic community will never peel Lukashenko’s Belarus from Putin’s Russia, the experience of 2020 and the minority support for Lukashenko indicate that Belarusian society is fragmented. Such fracture invites opportunities for NATO and the EU to go about a differentiated strategy that singles out Lukashenko and his inner circle for conditional sanctioning while expressing support for the liberal and pro-democratic Belarusian civil society. 

The new government in London should revisit British policy on Belarus and work with Poland to identify ways for strengthening the defence against Lukashenko’s destabilising policy choices. How to address Belarus may yet be another vector of cooperation that the British-Polish-Ukrainian trilateral pact can take up.

Lukashenko and his autocracy have shown much resilience, but as he, and Putin for that matter, age, the UK alongside its allies and partners in NATO and the EU, should prepare for political change in Belarus – to have the most positive impact.

Dr Alexander Lanoszka is the Ernest Bevin Associate Fellow in Euro-Atlantic Geopolitics at the Council on Geostrategy and Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Waterloo. His most recent book is Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century.

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