KNOW NOW:
Weaponizing Migrants
A tyrant, a craven power play and an East-West test
This is Novogrudok in Grodny Province, a rural region running hundreds of square miles along western Belarus. Cross the triangular border and find Lithuania and Poland, former cogs of the Communist wheel, both struggling democracies and North Atlantic Treaty Organization members in the decades since they left the Soviet orbit. The two countries have long focused on Belarus’ Alyaksandr Lukashenko, a Soviet revivalist who put his people in a stranglehold shortly after assuming power in 1994; a thug who’s been an easy reach for benefactor Russian President Vladimir Putin. He’s become more dangerous as he digs into his autocracy, crushing domestic dissent and corroding civil society with fear-based governance. But Lukashenko’s bold, bizarre incursions into their countries has the entire front on alert.
Out of a tyrant’s playbook, Lukashenko lost the 2020 election, quickly exiled the winner, savagely beat his critics and imprisoned those who survived. He’s punishing the EU for rejecting his presidency in a gambit so profane, it’s a standout even in the ugly world of human trafficking: luring stateless and homeless people to release them as a blight on his EU neighbors. Targeting embattled Arabs and Africans with just enough means to pay their way, the Belarusian leader opened tourist offices in Baghdad, Beirut, Dubai and Istanbul, created new flights to Minsk, dangled visas, hotels and transit into Europe. Thousands of hopeful adults and children spent all they had and flew to Belarus, where armed personnel quickly dispatched groups out to this province. Local security then led them by foot or motored along highways cut through thickly forested areas until they reached the borders of Lithuania and Poland. Human rights groups detail reports of Belarusians forcing migrants through punctured fencing, picking up those who fail to make it through, assaulting them and sending them back to try again. Shamed by NGOs for not admitting the migrants, Poland has since installed new steel rods, razor wire and tens of thousands of troops to prevent further incursions. Like the rest of the Eastern European neighborhood, Warsaw is on edge over Russia’s renewed belligerence and strategic plays in what used to constitute the Soviet Union. To them, by association, Russia is the instigator.
Strident and careful to protect his maneuverability, Lukashenko has so far avoided activating the close ties he and then Russian President Boris Yeltsin envisioned when they signed the 1990s Joint State agreement. The Belarusian fears it as a usurpation of his power over an independent state, but he hasn’t cleared the bloody path toward holding down the presidency by himself; the Kremlin has given him twenty years of backing. Putin relies on Belarus as a steady defiance of western pressure in the near term, and a potential land grab when the time is right. They’ve made their deals over the years: Moscow has plied Minsk with oil, gas, money, and durables, becoming the dominant energy provider, trade partner and financier while Lukashenko has agreed to call the Kremlin if he ever feels like he’s losing a grip. It seemed possible when he declared an election victory widely perceived as fraudulent, but he quickly, confidently put a clamp on civil society, by attacking and arresting tens of thousands, conducting closed-door trials, torturing and killing.
Western response has been slow and uneven, tangled in energy ties, emasculated by domestic politics. Courtesy of Russia’s open spigot of subsidized oil and gas, Belarus is a well-established refiner and reseller to Europe. It’s Putin’s way of buoying Minsk and impacting the region. NATO’s command has an ever-widening view of Russian trouble spots, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and more. It launched exercises meant to intimidate, but Washington has already declared it won’t intervene militarily if Russia invades Ukraine again. The EU, the US, Canada and the UK imposed economic sanctions, trade embargoes and travel restrictions. Belarus’ neighbors now scrambling to erect physical barriers refuse NGO support and block media coverage, leaving spotty access for locally controlled United Nations offices. Hundreds, if not thousands of migrants slipped into Poland and the Baltics. Many thousands more, upward of 7,000 Kurds lured from Northern Iraq, remain stuck in Belarus, fighting the elements in open air camps and warehoused in a guarded storage facility.
A country of nine million white Christians, this is not a place where migrants of color can easily blend in. Here, throughout Grodny Province and all of Belarus, signage is in Cyrillic. Slow-moving villages are laid out in neat rows of houses that fall off into farm fields and processing plants. People and animals are the street traffic, with clanking farm equipment or the occasional car belching by. Broad-faced women with metal-lined teeth beat rugs, and sweep their front walks of dust. A babushka in a purple work coat bounds out her front gate to greet a trash collector. Flashing a smile of obvious satisfaction, she heaves a big pile into the open truck. Credited for all but eliminating the poverty rate, Lukashenko has ensured his people jobs and services. The change is visible in the split between newer cinder block housing and peeling, wooden clapboard houses showing a century of wear. Many backyards are reserved for Belarusian Black Pied Pigs who chomp on bright red apples. The long dark swine are local pride, crossbred in Minsk for the highest meat and lard yields and raised here for local consumption.
Home farming will become essential as their world closes. Economists project a grim outlook, given the country’s increasing insolation: non-Russian commerce dried up and the biggest blow, the new embargo on downstream chemicals, petroleum products and potash fertilizer wipes out the lucrative export market. It’s a challenging time for Putin. Belarusian Analytical Workshop BAW records a plunge in public support for a union with Russia while a Chatham House survey reveals concern that a Lukashenko regime equals greater dependence on Russia. One area of strong agreement across surveys: If Lukashenko holds on, expect severe economic hardship and repression.
DO NOW:
Need context? Here’s some deep expertise on the East-West dynamic: Carlo Bastasin offers an important start; Lilia Shevtsova powerfully argues “Ukraine is Only Part of Putin’s Plans”; Sweden’s Defense Research Agency frames security concerns in a succinct brief. Moscow’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace gauges Putin against headstrong leaders in Kazakhstan and Belarus; Chatham House looks at why Belarus has long been engaged to Russia but never married; and the German Council on Foreign Relations gives a must-read assessment. Like to crunch numbers? The most reliable may be from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which suspended operations in Belarus. Find updates to the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control’s response to Belarus’ array of abuses. Only the Belarusian Red Cross, the UNHCR and the Swiss-based International Organization for Migration have sporadic on the ground access. The IOM already began broadcasting its return of traumatized Iraqi Kurds, more than 400 in each planeload.
Amy Kaslow
Assistant Editor: Jordan Lee