Kyiv, Ukraine – Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin made it sound as though Western nations were to thank for making his decades-old dream to merge Russia with neighbouring Belarus come true.
“Unprecedented political and sanctions pressure from the so-called collective West pushes us to speed up the merging processes,” Vladimir Putin said on July 1 at a forum in the western Belarusian city of Grodno, a stone’s throw away from the European Union’s border.
“Because together, it will be easier to minimise the damage from the illegal sanctions” imposed on Russia and Belarus by the West, Putin said.
A week earlier, his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko urged leaders of other ex-Soviet nations to get closer to the “union state” of Russia and Belarus – or face the loss of their independence.
“Today, the nations of post-Soviet space must be sincerely interested in their rapprochement with the union state – if, of course, they want to keep their sovereignty and independence,” he said in a video address.
“Those who hesitate have to understand – without the promptest unification and rapprochement, stronger inter-state ties and just simple human relations, tomorrow we might not be any more,” said Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994 and whose re-elections have increasingly been marred by violence against his rivals and protesters.
In the late 1990s, Lukashenko was eager to merge his ex-Soviet nation of 9.2 million with Russia – and signed a deal to create a “union state” with a common constitution and parliament.
The former collective farm manager, nicknamed “Bat’ka” (Daddy), hoped to succeed the heavy-drinking Russian President Boris Yeltsin whose mental and physical state was rapidly deteriorating.
Yeltsin, however, anointed Putin, a teetotal intelligence chief, as his successor in 1999, and Lukashenko hit the brakes on the merger.
But he kept milking the Kremlin, getting multibillion-rouble loans, discounted natural gas, trade preferences and perks for Belarusian labour migrants.
Russia’s backing helped Lukashenko, who has long been dubbed “Europe’s last dictator”, to keep his head above water politically and economically, especially when the West sanctioned Minsk for its intensified crackdown on opposition and critics.
Lukashenko also kept looking for leeway.
He sought to wean his economy off the profits from state-run collective farms, chemical plants and a giant oil refinery that used cheap Russian crude.
Defying his image of a former Communist official with a Chevron moustache and a strong rural 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 shrank after the boiling point in 2020, when hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets to protest against his sixth re-election.
They clashed with police and held strikes – but Lukashenko’s law enforcement agencies responded with violence, torture, arrests and prison sentences.
Tens of thousands left Belarus, including many IT experts, mostly for neighbouring Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine.
Lukashenko appeared cornered, and Moscow remained his only backer – while the Kremlin kept pushing him to finalise the merger.
Russian officials remembered too well how Putin’s approval ratings rose to a stratospheric 88 percent after Moscow’s previous “acquisition” – the 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.
The USSR revived?
To some observers, the merger is a done deal; they view it as part of Moscow’s plans to announce the revival of the truncated replica of the Soviet Union this December.
“The matter has been solved in the light of the USSR’s centennial anniversary in December 2022 and Putin’s plans to create a ‘third empire’ that would [succeed czarist Russia and the USSR and] include Belarus,” Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch…
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