Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko is so weakened that his army hasn’t been called to fight in Ukraine because Russian President Vladimir Putin can’t be sure the troops would follow his orders, exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said.
“I’m sure that he [Lukashenko] would give the order to the Belarusian army to participate in this invasion — if he was sure they would fight,” Tsikhanouskaya told POLITICO during an interview in Brussels. “Just imagine the situation if he made this order, the Belarusian army went across the border, and they defect, they change sides, they hide, because they actually don’t want to fight the Ukrainians. Just imagine his reputation in front of Putin, in front of the Kremlin — it would be an epic fail.”
Lukashenko has upped his saber-rattling this week by pledging to conduct joint deployments with the Russians. While such maneuvers must always be closely observed because Belarus is an important springboard for invading Ukraine or conducting air raids, Tsikhanouskaya insisted Putin could hardly allow the Belarusian soldiers to cross the border.
“I think that the Russian command don’t trust the Belarusian army,” she said. “They are not sure they would fulfill the order.”
Tsikhanouskaya, who ran against Lukashenko in the fraudulent presidential election in 2020 before being forced to flee Belarus amid a brutal, Kremlin-backed crackdown on the opposition, now lives in exile. Meanwhile, with Putin propping up his regime, Lukashenko has ridden out two years of protests, international condemnation and sanctions. While Putin would like to parade Lukashenko as a war ally, he would be even more worried about his regime collapsing and Belarus following Ukraine toward a more pro-Western orbit.
With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine flailing, as Kyiv’s forces recapture large swathes of territory and chalk up major symbolic victories like the attack on Putin’s signature Kerch Bridge from occupied Crimea to the Russian mainland, Lukashenko has found himself increasingly exposed.
Any image of Lukashenko’s invincibility “is an illusion,” Tsikhanouskaya said, and “everything is collapsing.”
The early days of the war highlighted the level of hidden dissent thrumming just beneath the surface in Belarus.
“Back in February 2022, it was unexpected even for us when partisans started to work, started to make these acts of sabotage,” the 40-year-old Tsikhanouskaya said, referring to reports of dozens of Belarusians taking out railway links connecting Russia to Ukraine through Belarus, disrupting Moscow’s supply lines.
“Most of them are new people we don’t know,” said Franak Viačorka, a senior adviser to Tsikhanouskaya, adding that 11 of these saboteurs have now been put on trial, though many more were likely involved. “They are not members of an organized cabinet or democratic movement … they were never involved in opposition or democratic structures,” Viačorka said.
Since those early days of the war, Tsikhanouskaya’s team has been inundated with information — even members of the Belarus military establishment have “started to look for a way out,” Viačorka said. “Now we receive a lot of information from the inside, even from people who are standing on the border inside of the army. Plus there are 30,000 ordinary volunteers who are sending information about Russian troops.”
That has put the opposition in a better position than it was in 2020, when protestors first took to the streets in response to the stolen election, but were unable to bring down Lukashenko’s regime.
Waiting for a window
Tsikhanouskaya and her backers are waiting for “the window of opportunity” — when Putin and his proxy Lukashenko are sufficiently weakened by the war in Ukraine — to pounce back into the fight on the ground in Belarus, the opposition leader said.
Organizing mass protests in Belarus now is “impossible” because “the price is too high,” Tsikhanouskaya insisted, pointing to the increasing repression of the local population.
Among Minsk’s political prisoners is her own husband, Sergei Tsikhanousky, who was last year sentenced to 18 years in prison for inciting social unrest. The video blogger was arrested in May 2020 as he was preparing to run for the presidency against Lukashenko — and it was after his detention that Tsikhanouskaya stood in the election instead.
“Our task as Belarusian people is not to waste people’s life, people’s freedom, in vain,” Tsikhanouskaya said. “If people now rise up, there will be new political prisoners, a new wave of bigger repressions — and it will not be very efficient or effective.”
While they look for the right moment, the opposition is focused on stoking dissent and building legitimacy and recognition of Tsikhanouskaya’s government-in-exile.
“Our main work now is in the informational space. We have to stay in contact with Belarusian people, look for new ways to reach different groups of people, to counter Russian and Belarusian propaganda.”
Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko greets troops | Maxim Guchek/Belta/AFP via Getty Images
Much of the opposition’s efforts to keep the fire of dissent burning in Belarus have moved to social media.
Chinese-owned video-blogging app TikTok was particularly powerful in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, Viačorka said. After the mass protests broke out, Lukashenko’s regime “blocked all the social networks, but they were afraid to mess with China. So they left TikTok, and TikTok became the main political platform for three weeks.”
Now, it’s all about YouTube — which “became the new television.”
Tsikhanouskaya’s staffers “work with Google on a daily basis” to block Minsk’s propaganda on the platform, Viačorka said, after discovering Lukashenko was spending “millions of dollars” serving up ads featuring political prisoners giving forced confessions to Belarusians viewing opposition content. Viačorka said over 100 accounts posting such ads had been removed from the platform.
Viačorka said most tech firms are eager to help — though Facebook owner Meta is “perhaps” the least engaged.
Some tech firms have helped restore the accounts of political prisoners who had their phones seized and their handles forcibly deleted by Lukashenko’s regime; while TikTok has invited Belarusian political influencers to training events.
Building a government-in-waiting
Tsikhanouskaya, who is in Brussels for meetings with EU leaders, including lawmakers from the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee and the Belgian foreign minister, is establishing a permanent mission in Brussels, led by Uladzimir Astapenka — Lukashenko’s one-time ambassador to Argentina who resigned in 2020 in opposition to the regime’s violent crackdown.
It’s all part of a move to legitimize Tsikhanouskaya’s government-in-waiting, and present it as a credible alternative to the long-ruling Lukashenko.
“What we didn’t manage to do in 2020 and 2021 — we couldn’t split the elites, we couldn’t split law enforcement, because we didn’t have anything to propose to them, we didn’t have structure,” Tsikhanouskaya said. “People lived for 27 years in this regime, they forgot how to think critically, how to be creative.”
Tsikhanouskaya now wants her backers in the international community to create more pressure on Lukashenko’s regime — by isolating it on the world stage, refusing to meet with or recognize its representatives and envoys, enforcing existing sanctions to close loopholes and cut off his access to funds — and by treating her “cabinet” as the true government of Belarus.
“The more you create pressure on the regime, the better,” Tsikhanouskaya said. That means applying “economic pressure, political isolation, not sending ambassadors to Belarus, not communicating with them.”
Gian Volpicelli contributed to this report.
