Asian Angle | How Russia’s response to Belarus could lead to a globalised conflict

While the stand-off in Belarus steals the headlines, the bloodiest recent clash in the vast post-Soviet theatre – smack in the middle of the global coronavirus pandemic – saw a return last month to kinetic border exchanges between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Just as China and India collided along their borders, the resumption of border hostilities between Yerevan and Baku saw nearly two dozen people killed.

From Russia to Turkmenistan, and from Ukraine to Uzbekistan, no stable algorithm has been divined for peaceful transitions of power at the centre of post-Soviet government. With the exception of the three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – the decision-making in Minsk, as in Moscow, Bishkek, Astana, Dushanbe, Baku and Yerevan, is driven by a survivalist instinct and improvisation appropriate to any young state – and all post-Soviet states are very young – whose leadership understands that leaving power typically yields one of three fates: death, prison or exile. (A taxi driver in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa said it best when he told me, in famous Odessa humour, in 2005: “Our politicians are either in jail, have been in jail, or are otherwise going to jail.”)

If Lukashenko survives in power, it will only be thanks to very heavy-handed crackdowns and repression, with the spectre of growing intervention – now formally requested – from neighbouring Russia. The succession question will then have been put off by a year or two at best, after which the current stand-offs will be repeated.

But if Lukashenko is forcibly ousted from power, then neighbouring Russia will almost certainly be strategically radicalised. Such Russian radicalisation will not be as extreme as we witnessed in 2014 following the ouster of Viktor Yanukovich in Ukraine – which saw Russia annex Crimea and bona fide war break out in the Donbass – but Moscow will doubtless feel compelled to counteract the delegitimation of the authorities in Minsk with moves that relegitimate the standing of Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. After all, even if Putin has secured a constitutional amendment allowing him to govern until the year 2036, he has no obvious dauphin and mounting internal and regional tensions in the world’s largest and most complex country will force him to reckon daily with the existential question of succession.

Belarus (population 10 million) is clearly not as important to the Russian psyche and Russian strategy as Ukraine (population over 40 million). Nor is it as important to European and Western strategy and imagination. And yet the future viability of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, of which Belarus is a founding member, turns on the fate of the protests in Minsk. Moreover, even if Nato membership for Belarus is not a realistic scenario regardless of the fate of Lukashenko, the stand-off between Moscow and Western capitals over Ukraine remains unresolved, while Russia’s strategic cooperation with, and trust in, China has intensified significantly in inverse proportion with the diminishing trust between China and leading Western countries in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.