How Has Russian Media Covered Protests In Belarus, And With What Consequences?

Every few years, seemingly the same story plays itself out in either Eastern Europe, or the Middle East. In the capital of a country in that region, the streets become filled with marching protestors, with whom the media in the West, especially the United States, falls instantly in love. A country that was irrelevant to ninety-nine percent of Americans suddenly becomes the hotbed of the fight between democracy and dictatorship, with either the implied or explicit exhortation in the media that the United States and other Western countries needs to “do something” to come to the aid of the protestors.

One of the more recent instances of this took place in the Ukraine in the winter of 2013 and spring of 2014. Protestors took to the streets demanding the resignation of President Viktor Yanukovych, and they quickly became a superficial cause celebre in the West, to the point where actor Jared Leto (who likely would not have previously been able to locate the Ukraine on a map) gave the protestors a shout out in his Oscar acceptance speech.

It has since emerged that there was a darker side to the Ukranian revolution, in that it has allowed neo-Nazi elements to proliferate more freely than ever before throughout the country. Many Ukrainians and pro-Ukrainian pundits in the West will insist that any allegations of these neo-Nazi elements having major power and influence are Russian propaganda, and indeed Russia media does make this a talking point in their outlets geared towards an English language audience and those geared towards a domestic, Russian-speaking audience. However, that does not take away from the fact that the neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine is real and a persistent issue in the country to this day.

Furthermore, much of the genuine discontent with Yanukovych’s government was due to its oligarchic and corrupt nature- the hope was that the Maidan Revolution would dispel that corruption from the Ukraine. Six years on, that has also failed to materialize, even as current President Volodimir Zelensky won a landslide election victory in 2019 on the promise of cleaning up the country. In the year since taking office, Zelensky has struggled to enact his reform agenda. Perhaps this is at root due to the fact that he himself was sponsored by one of Ukraine’s most notorious oligarchs to begin with.

Six years on from the events in Ukraine, the eyes of the world have turned once again to a previously overlooked country in Eastern Europe, this time Belarus. For many years now, Belarus has been often referred to as the“last dictatorship in Europe,” as it has been governed by the same man since 1994, Aleksander Lukashenko. In the wake of presidential elections held on August 9, the opposition has mobilized large rallies in the streets of major cities, especially the capital of Minks, claiming widespread electoral fraud (according to official results, Lukashenko won with eighty percent of the vote).

Common among the protestors is the white and red variant of the Belarusian flag, which was used by the country between 1991 (when it gained independence from the Soviet Union) and 1994, when Lukashenko was first elected to the Presidency. The current official version of the flag is modeled after the flag that Belarus used when it was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union, whose history and imagery Lukashenko has put at the center of his rule, particulary the country’s role in World War II, when over a quarter of the country’s population perished during the fight against the Nazi invaders.

Much of the West rallied behind the opposition and the protest movement. The European Union, which had in fact been working to improve relations with Belarus in recent years, imposed sanctions on top Belarusian officials allegedly involved with fraud and protest suppression. Furthermore, the EU announced that 53 billion Euros that had previously been earmarked for the Belarusian government would instead go to “civil society” ie the opposition. The reset in relations, which even earlier in 2020 major European think tanks were calling to be deepened, seemingly came to an end overnight.

Prior to the events of August 2020, the United States had similarly been working to deepen relations with “Europe’s last dictatorship.” In September of 2019, then-National Security Advisor John Bolton paid an official visit to Minsk, where he met with Lukashenko. This was followed by a visit from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in February of 2020, where not only did he meet with Lukashenko, he critically offered to sell American oil and gas to the Eastern European country.

This was critical because Russia had previously been the near-exclusive supplier of fuel to Belarus up until that point. In Lukashenko’s early years in office, he brought Belarus closer in relations to Russia once again, as would have been expected of him based on his track record- as a deputy in the Supreme Soviet of the Belarussian SSR, he had voted against Belarus’ declaration of independence from the Soviet Union.

In 1996, Lukashenko and Russia’s then-President Boris Yeltsin signed a treaty creating a Union State between the two countries, creating a framework for integration between the two countries while preserving Belarus’ sovereignty. However, to both pro-Russian Belorussians and many Russian nationalists, the Union State treaty seemed to be, they hoped, a sign that the two countries, which both views hold to be brothers as both fellow Slavs and Orthodox Christians, would eventually be fully united under one banner again.

However, the path towards further integration has not been a straight line in the twenty four years since the signing of the treaty. It has been speculated by some that at the time the treaty was signed, Lukashenko hoped to replace the catastrophically unpopular Yeltsin as Russia’s President himself, although of course this did not materialize and Vladimir Putin was elevated and then elected instead.

Beyond the Union State, Belarus is bound to Russia through joint membership in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Russia and some former Soviet states’ answer to NATO. For most of Lukashenko’s tenure, the country seemed securely in the Russian sphere of influence, with Russia providing Belarus with oil and gas at a subsidized rate, enabling Lukashenko to maintain much of Belarus’ former Soviet industrial infrastructure and welfare state.

The pro-Western moves of Lukashenko that culminated in the visits by Bolton and Pompeo were years in the making, a fact that did not go unnoticed by observers in the Russian and pro-Russian media. A key example of this would be the writings of Andrew Korybko. Korybko is an American writer and radio host for Russian media outlet Sputnik, among other outlets. Korybko was one of the earliest English language pro Russian writers to warn about Belarus’ westward drift, noting in a 2015 article several signs that Belarus was changing its orientation towards the West.

Foremost among those signs were Lukashenko entering into dispute on the status of the aforementioned Russian energy subsidies, seeking to preserve or even lower the rates that Belarus was paying. This also, critically, included a somewhat neutral stance by Lukashenko on Russia’s actions in response to the Maidan in Ukraine, such as criticizing the annexation of Crimea.

Over the next several years, Korybko tracked the Belarusian westward drift in a series of articles, seemingly more pessimistically resigned to the fact that the country’s new orientation was inevitable. And events in the broader world seemed to bear this out, as 2020 saw the Russian-Belarusian energy dispute intensify, to the point where, in addition to courting Pompeo, Lukashenko signed deals to import oil from Norway, declaring he wanted Belarus’ imports of Russian oil to be halved.

The climactic moment in Russian-Belarusian tensions came close to the eve of the protests in July 2020, as Belarus arrested thirty-three Russians allegedly employed by the Russian private military contractor Wagner. As the protests initially unfolded, Lukashenko, predictably perhaps, blamed them on foreign agitation, only the foreign agitator he blamed Russia, prompting official denials from the Kremlin.

It is this foregrounding that makes the reaction of the broader Russian media as a whole to the protests against Lukashenko all the less surprising given this greater context. Examining Russian and pro-Russian media coverage of the protests in Belarus, at least initially, one finds them, if not quite as supportive as Western media, then not nearly as opposed to them as they were almost universally to the Maidan in the Ukraine.

A few days after the election, RT ran an op-ed (by American writer Bradley Blankenship) saying explicitly that the protests in Belarus were not a “color revolution.” Color revolution refers to changes of power in post-Soviet republics, such as the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 or the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, that in Russia are generally viewed with suspicion as being astroturfed with covert (and sometimes overt) funding and support from the West. Not so the Belarusian protests, according to Blankenship, these were “truly a grassroots and legitimate movement.”

In parallel, official voices in Russian government were speaking out against Lukashenko. Maria Zakharova, official spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, condenmed Belarussian police attacks on journalists as “not brotherly.” Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the (ironically named) right-wing nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, which is one of the largest opposition parties in Russia but sometimes collaborates with the government, mocked Lukashenko, calling him “a bachelorette no one wants to marry.”

Perhaps the strongest condemnation of Lukashenko from Russian quarters came from Konstantin Zatulin, a Duma representative from United Russia, often called President Vladimir Putin’s party (although in the most recent election in 2018 Putin ran as an independent). Zatulin, the deputy chair of the Duma committee on post-Soviet affairs, outright called the results “falsified” and referred to Lukashenko as “deranged.”

While Putin himself did congratulate Lukashenko on his election victory, this mixed response from both official and unofficial channels was certainly not unnoticed in Minsk. What prompted this reaction to the protests against Lukashenko? One takeaway is that this shows the tendency of Russia observers in the West to often simplify the political and media landscape in the world’s largest country- even in official channels, things are not merely micromanaged by the personal decree of Putin himself.

There is also more of an ideological diversity to the Belarussian protest movement, at least initially, than many assume. Indeed, the only reason that Svetlana Tikhonovskaya has become the face of the Belarussian opposition in the first place is that the presumed strongest opposition candidate, Viktor Babariko, was arrested in June. Babariko, former head of Russian bank Belgazprombank, has been described as having pro-Russian views.

Perhaps Russia hoped (not without reason) that the protest movement would result in someone more amenable than Lukashenko taking power, such as Babariko. Perhaps, having grown tired of Lukashenko, Russian decision-makers believed they could deal even with the leaders of a “color revolution” more effectively. This is, after all, what has happened in Armenia (which Andrew Korybko also warned in 2015 was drifting westward) since 2018, as Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, a reformer brought into power by a somewhat similar protest movement, only to maintain friendly relations with Russia.

However, there has since been a controversy over elements of the official Belarusian opposition (now personified by Tikhonovskaya) and aspects of their program, which many of those who oppose Lukashenko but favor maintaining fraternal relations with Russia would not approve of. This would include exiting from the Union State and restoring a hard customs border with Russia, neither of which are supported by the majority of Belarussian, according to independent polling cited in the above Politico article on Babariko.

This webpage of the program was deleted (the linked version is an archived one from the Wayback Machine), and Tikhanovskaya has insisted that she is not in favor of such measures as closing the border, but it is likely that Russia is unconvinced by these denials. The leak of this program seems to reveal that, should the Belarusian opposition come to power, the orientation they would follow towards Russia would be much more like that of the Ukraine post-2014 than Armenia post-2018.

In the days following the leak of the program in particular and the emergence of Tikhonovskaya as the official face of the opposition in general, the rhetoric from Russian media has grown increasingly frosty towards at least the leadership of the opposition. Writing once again in RT, Bradley Blankenship accused Tikhonovskaya of “cozying up to Washington”, calling it “a major strategic blunder.” In the piece, he quotes Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who refers to the deleted part of the opposition’s program.

The effect of this media pressure on Lukashenko, while on one likely the genuine belief of those articulating it, was also (especially when coming from the likes of official spokespeople) to make him realize that he could not continue to take Russia’s support for granted and play both sides between them and the West to his own benefit. If that is the case, then the pressure campaign seems to have worked.

On August 14, Belarus handed the arrested Wagner mercenaries back to Russia, denying the request of the Ukranian government for their extradition. The next day, Lukashenko spoke publicly of his need to contact Vladimir Putin, saying that the protest movement was a threat to Russia as much as to Belarus. Roughly a week later, Lukashenko reversed his earlier rhetoric on Russian backing of the protests, now accusing other “external factors” (implied to be NATO) of fomenting the unrest.

Those Russian and pro-Russian media figures who had previously denounced Lukashenko may not have suddenly turned around to embrace him with open arms, but the denunciations seem to have ceased. Official rhetoric seems to be focusing much more on discouraging interference from “foreign actors,” almost certainly referring to the EU and NATO. Finally, Putin has announced that a Russian reserve police force stands ready to assist Lukashenko should it become necessary. Regardless of one’s position on the unfolding situation, one hopes that it does not, in fact, become necessary.

Aleksandr Lukashenko does not seem likely, at this point, to flee the country he has led for so long as former Ukrainian President Yanukovych did. Much has been made of the video footage of him in full riot gear, armed with an assault rifle, as he headed to rally up assembled security forces. But, more quietly, he seems to have been forced to tacitly concede that he can no longer play to the West against Russia any longer. Will that lead Belarus on a course towards full unification or even absorption with Russia through the Union State? It is difficult to say, and even now such a process would likely take years. But as long as Lukashenko is in power, his “westward drift” has almost certainly come to an end.