The four newest headstones, decorated with plastic flowers, gave evidence of more recent arrivals — the graves of migrants from Yemen and Syria who died trying to cross the nearby border from Belarus, after the country’s strongman Alexander Lukashenko deployed illegal migration as a weapon against Poland and the EU last autumn.

The Tatars of Bohoniki prepare and deliver food to their co-religionist migrants who make it through the closed border, hiding in the forests, as well as to the Polish troops and border guards whose role it is to hunt them down and return them across the barbed wire border fence. Outside the village’s small wooden mosque, a banner spread against the railings declares: “Thank you for your service and for protecting our border #PolishMilitaryWall.” For centuries, the Tatar minority distinguished itself through loyal military service to Poland’s rulers, serving as cavalry in the contested steppes of Ukraine, against the Ottomans at Vienna, and conducting one of the last Polish cavalry charges against the invading Germans in 1939.

This bleak stretch of borderland, an extension of the great Eurasian steppe with no defensible natural frontiers, has always witnessed the movement of peoples and the sudden extinction of nations following the ebb and flow of imperial borders. The golden onion domes of Orthodox churches rise up from the wooden cottages of villages which seem to have spilled over the natural border: though of course it was the borders which came after the peoples, washing back and forth in bloody waves.

An ethnic map of the province in the late 19th century reveals a Pollock painting of peoples, two of whom — the Jews and the Germans — have been entirely expunged from the region within living memory. Twice in the past 300 years, Poland has vanished entirely, carved up by hungry neighbours. Twice in the twentieth century, these borderlands were drenched in blood as great empires rose and fell. Now, once again, Europe’s eastern marches are witnessing the massing of armies and the threat of a sudden, violent reordering of borders as a great empire wanes.

At its moment of greatest strength in the Nineties, the American empire expanded to encompass these borderlands, taking the former satellite states of the Soviet Union under the Nato umbrella. Now that the great empire is itself weakened by political turbulence at home and an existential challenge in East Asia, a resurgent Russia feels emboldened to renegotiate this settlement by the threat of force, demanding that not just that Nato advances no further eastward, but also that it withdraws from the region.

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No-one can predict with certainty what will happen next: but as troops and materiel flood westwards in vast numbers across Russia to the eastern marches of America’s European empire, it seems clear our continent is at a great inflection point, like 1914 or 1939, 1945 or 1989. The generation-long slumber of the post-Cold War era has ended: Europe is awakening to history once again.

With every day, it becomes more likely that a great hammer blow is about to descend on Ukraine. More than 100,000 Russian troops have been deployed to Ukraine’s frontiers, in a great arc from Belarus to the north to the Black Sea in the southeast. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its parallel detachment of two predominantly Russian-speaking portions of eastern Ukraine did not bring about the great reordering Putin sought in Eastern Europe. The Minsk agreement that sought to end the war did not bear fruit; Ukraine’s armed forces are stronger than they were eight years ago, and the Ukrainian purchase of Turkish Bayraktar attack drones threatens to overturn the fragile stalemate in the country’s east.

For Russia, there is therefore no better time to attack than now, while Europe is weak and divided and the Americans are distracted. The sheer size and strength of the Russian armed forces, which have rapidly modernised since 2014, will likely overwhelm any Ukrainian opposition. What happens next will be Putin’s choice, and perhaps he has not yet decided.

Yet the military toolkit he has assembled in recent weeks gives him a wealth of options: he could destroy the Ukrainian armed forces from afar with stand-off weapons without any new border incursions; he could formally annex the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk; he could even attack along Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, deploying the naval infantry and amphibious armoured vehicles recently moved to the border from the Russian Far East, capable of seizing territory from Mariupol in the east as far west as Odessa and the border with Romania; finally, Russia could move on Kyiv itself, striking both south from Belarus and westward across the flat plains in a display of armoured warfare of a type Europe has not seen since 1945.

Ukraine’s options in all this are limited in the extreme. The claims by Western thinktankers that Russia will have no stomach for the guerrilla warfare that will ensue seem doubtful: Putin is unlikely to send his troops to the Ukrainian nationalist heartlands of the west, where the topography lends itself to armed resistance.

The flat plains of the country’s east, though useless for an insurgency, are ideal for a quick armoured blitzkrieg all the way to Kyiv and the Dnieper river. Russia will control the airspace above the battlefields, and a Ukrainian repeat of the successful deployment of Bayraktar drones by Azerbaijan against a degraded Armenian army therefore seems impossible. Ukraine’s greatest chance of avoiding military defeat and perhaps dismemberment at Putin’s hands lies in Western diplomacy: and this is surely now the country’s greatest curse.

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The simple fact is, Nato will not go to war with Russia for Ukraine. As it stands, Ukraine is about to suffer a historic defeat to defend the illusion that it may one day join the Nato alliance, a point of principle that everyone involved knows to be fantasy. By sending Ukraine munitions and non-lethal aid, Nato powers like the US and Britain, as well as the Baltic states, have already approached the utmost limits of their response to Russia. The threat of sanctions will count for less than our leaders claim against a Russia that has successfully reordered its economy to cope with the Western sanctions deployed since 2014, and which is increasingly reorienting itself towards America’s great rival China. Indeed, it is now Russia that has the upper hand in threatening Europe by withholding its own vital resources.

It is midwinter after all, and Europe is dependent on Russian gas to keep European voters warm in their homes. Almost half of Germany and Poland’s gas supply comes from Russia; countries like Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia and Finland are almost 100% dependent. No wonder that Germany’s government is doing all that it can to avoid becoming embroiled in this confrontation, refusing to supply Ukraine with munitions, and with Germany’s new SPD chancellor Olaf Scholz refusing even to take Biden’s calls on the crisis. Europe has had since at least 2014 to wean itself off its dependence on Russia, and chose not to, with Germany instead deepening its energy dependency by shuttering its nuclear power plants and constructing the Nordstream 2 pipeline despite American pressure to cancel it.

Instead, it is France, energy secure through its network of nuclear power stations, that is playing the greatest EU role in defending Nato’s eastern borders, pushing for a forward presence in Romania and sending warships to the Black Sea. There is a great irony here: the scepticism of Poland and the Baltic states over French proposals for greater European capacity to defend itself from external threats was used by the German security establishment to dampen any enthusiasm for strategic autonomy, with German politicians and analysts making great rhetorical play of the sacred Nato bond. But now that Nato’s integrity is threatened by Russia’s demands that the alliance “pull back” from Romania and Bulgaria, which joined in 1997, Germany recuses itself from involvement. Through its dependency on Putin’s goodwill, it is ironically Germany that has distanced itself from Nato, a negative form of strategic autonomy from the US, if not from Russia. That great weakness at the heart of Europe, Merkel’s parting shot, now threatens the security of the continent’s eastern fringes.

One way or another, Nato’s newer Eastern members will now learn the value of America’s security guarantee compared to that of a strong Europe capable of defending itself. Biden’s initial remark that the United States would not severely punish a “minor incursion” into Ukraine’s territory did not inspire confidence; his administration is now briefing that America is considering deploying thousands of troops to the eastern Nato countries.

The limited deployment of US forces in Poland and the Baltic states after 2014 was a purely symbolic exercise: the decision to deploy tens of thousands of American troops, if it actually occurs, is a signal to Russia that America is prepared to defend the European half of its core empire if necessary, despite the greater need to concentrate its attention and resources on the looming showdown in the Pacific’s other half. Rather than being a force multiplier for the US, Nato obligations now weaken America’s overall position: Europe’s weakness has now become America’s burden.

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For Britain, the options for involvement are limited. We are perhaps fortunate that decades of neglect have left the Army unable to deploy anything but a token force to the region. Even if it had a better record of success in recent conflicts, the British Army is now simply too small and weak to play any role in a major European war. The Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s border are already larger than the entire British Army, and their numbers grow every day.

Yet British politicians always display an appetite for getting involved in distant conflicts greater than their capabilities allow: it would surely be better for our political opposition to now focus their attention on what, if anything, Britain’s response should be to the looming war in our home continent than to drag on their weeks-long exegesis of civil servants’ illicit cheese and wine parties.

There is not much time to waste: a Russian armoured push will need to take place while the ground is still hard and frozen, before the spring thaws settle in and the soil turns to mush. This year’s late snows have likely delayed the hammer blow: Russia’s announcement of joint military exercises with Belarus between the 10th and 20th of February indicate the probable starting date. The deployment of Russian troops in large numbers to southern Belarus, whose border is less than 60 miles from Kyiv, is a major threat to Ukrainian planners: even if Putin does not decide to take the capital, the need to guard against a sudden push will force Ukrainian generals to spread their forces thinly, weakening their response to an assault elsewhere.

Principled though it may have been, the vocal support Poland and the Baltic states gave to Belarus’s opposition after last year’s disputed election may not have been wise. By driving Lukashenko further into Putin’s embrace just to survive, they have allowed Russian forces to deploy closer to the European Union’s borders than was previously the case, and enraged a mercurial neighbour. The recent migrant crisis with Poland, at the border post at Kuznica, just a few minute’s drive from the Tatar village of Bohoniki, was the immediate result, and perhaps history will record it as the opening incident of a great and terrible conflagration.

With European nations from Sweden in the Baltic to Romania in the Black Sea now deploying their limited troops and equipment in a defensive crouch, a great confrontation is developing across the continent’s east. All the states involved — apart from Britain — are acting according to the rational motives of self-interest.

It was natural for Nato’s eastern nations to seek America’s defence guarantees against their historic master, just as it is natural for Russia to resent the alliance’s expansion to its own borders. It was natural and rational for the United States to expand Nato eastward at the moment of its greatest strength and Russia’s greatest weakness, just as it is natural and rational for Russia to seek to renegotiate Nato presence now that her own forces are stronger than they have been since the fall of the Soviet Union, and now that the American empire seems to have entered its own period of decline.

In the coming days, the likelihood is that a shock and awe campaign analogous in scale to that of America in Iraq will take place in Ukraine; its chances of success seem far greater. The demands Russia has made of the United States — over the head of a Europe kept weak and powerless by its own leaders — cannot be met without America ceding its imperial role and prestige. Perhaps they are not intended to be met, and perhaps by enhancing the Nato presence on its borders, they will turn out to be counterproductive.

Yet once again, these flat and snowy borderlands seem destined to play their allotted role as arena for the contest of great empires, and the cockpit of Europe’s bloody history.

First published on 31 January 2022

Gorbachev and Reagan both had important roles to play, for sure — including in their surprising friendship. But not everything in history is about political leaders and superpowers.

Above all, the astonishing events that transformed Poland through an upsurge of popular resistance in autumn 1980 paved the way for everything that unfolded throughout the region in the years to come. The ripples of those events continue, including in neighbouring Belarus today.

The strikes 40 years ago in the shipyards of Gdańsk and then across the country led to the creation of Solidarity, an independent trade union with 10 million members which achieved legal status within the still-strong Soviet bloc. The Gdańsk Agreement was signed at the end of August 1980, and Solidarity as a national movement was formed on 17 September. This was an opposition movement, by any other name — in ways that had until then seemed unthinkable.

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These were dangerous times. Leonid Brezhnev, then Soviet leader, had given his name to what was described as “the Brezhnev doctrine”: if faced with a problem, send in the tanks. The Russians had invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, to stop the Prague Spring. Just eight months before Solidarity, they sent tanks into Afghanistan. The Western consensus was that the Polish strikers were foolhardy, because the authorities “clearly” could not agree to their demands. The Times took comfort from the fact that “the romantic and volatile Pole of tradition” was now “less in evidence”, and that therefore they would only demand what the authorities were ready to give.

It didn’t work out that way.

Poles, like Belarusians today, understood the risks better than any outside observers could do. A decade earlier, protests in Gdansk had been violently crushed, and dozens were killed. But, as I witnessed when living in Poland through these extraordinary days, Poles were energised by the astonishing possibilities of change. Despite all the power at the government’s disposal, non-violent mass action forced an unyielding police state to back down. That legacy would never be entirely erased.

In the months that followed, Poland was transformed. Unpublishable books were published. Unseen films were shown. Public meetings, traditionally dull affairs, became engaged and extraordinary. There were still self-imposed boundaries; most speakers tiptoed around the ever-present threat of Soviet intervention. But Poles could echo Wordsworth, on the French Revolution: bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.

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It didn’t last. After 16 months, the tanks did go on the streets. Solidarity was banned. Many were arrested and jailed. Dozens were killed. The sceptics and pessimists felt justified in saying: you see, we were right all along. Those pesky Poles had just been too bold, with their demands. The status quo had been restored.

Except that it never was restored, despite all the propaganda, the tear gas, the arrests. The dissident Adam Michnik was briefly released from jail under a political amnesty in 1984. Back behind bars the following year, he wrote of what he had seen while out on the streets, describing it as the “barren twilight” of the totalitarian world. His experience “exceeded not just my expectations but even my dreams”. Sooner or later, he wrote, “but I think sooner, we shall leave the prisons and come out of the underground on to the bright square of freedom”.

Many would have described Michnik as a naïve dreamer for those words, and understandably so. Within a few years, however, he was proved right. Solidarity was re-legalised. In August 1989, as East Europe Editor of the Independent, I was able to sit in the gallery of the Polish parliament and watch a Solidarity prime minister being appointed. Three months later, the Berlin Wall came down. Two years after that, the Soviet Union itself was history.

I was reminded of those words of Michnik recently, when reading the reflections of Svetlana Sugako of the (brilliant) semi-underground Belarus Free Theatre, who was held for several days with a colleague in an overcrowded cell in the Okrestina prison in Minsk, notorious for its violence and torture. Sugako said: “We went into jail in one country, and came out into another… I just burst into tears, it was so unbelievable.”

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Renewed official violence in Belarus is still an obvious possibility, as we are reminded by the sight of President Alexander Lukashenko strutting around with an assault rifle, and by the continued arrests and deaths. Lukashenko praises his violent OMON riot police, even as the non-violent protesters — with women often playing a key role — use creative methods to trump the violence. But, as with Poland in 1980 and 1981, each day that goes by makes it more difficult for Lukashenko (and his uneasy backers in Moscow) to return to the repressive status quo ante, whatever violence he or they may choose to use.

Arguably, Lukashenko has already overplayed his hand: if he had not claimed an offensively absurd “80%” electoral victory over his presidential challenger, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the protests against the stolen election might not have been so vigorous or sustained. Authoritarian leaders sometimes persuade themselves that they can do anything — as this week’s abduction of opposition leader Maria Kolesnikova by unidentified masked men made clear. But officials lawlessness and violence should not be seen as the last word.

As with Poland in 1980-81, this remains a fragile time. It is unsurprising that the most vocal support for the people of Belarus comes not from powerful Western governments but from the small neighbouring Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, who were also told by Western leaders that they were “unrealistic” in their aspirations to regain independence from Moscow, which they had lost when Stalin annexed all three countries under the secret terms of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939.

The stance of Moscow will remain important. Clearly, Vladimir Putin has every reason to be nervous about the prospective fall of Lukashenko, however little respect he may have for Lukashenko himself. The ripples of protest in Belarus could still spread into Russia itself — just as happened 30 years ago, when Russian slogans in solidarity with the Baltic states proclaimed: “For your and our freedom.”

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In 1989, I asked a pro-independence leader in Estonia if he was not frightened of the prospect of violence from Moscow, to stop this defiance of Kremlin rule.

No, he said: “You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.” To prove his point, he added: “Look what just happened in Poland”, where the appointment of a Solidarity prime minister had just been announced. Another activist calmly explained that any Soviet violence would simply be “the last dying flick of the dragon’s tail”. She and others were proved right. Eighteen months later, when Soviet tanks went into the Baltic states in January 1991, the violence backfired.

The end of the story in Belarus is not yet written. But if we see increased official violence and mass arrests and a part-Russian takeover tomorrow, that won’t mark the end of the story, any more than it did in Poland or the Baltic states. A Soviet hardline coup in August 1991 was supposed to stop reforms and restore Soviet strength. The coup collapsed because of popular protests after just three days. The Soviet Union itself ended four months later.

For Lukashenko and Putin alike, those lessons from history are impossible to ignore.

As a result, Belarusian elections are not something that many people pay much attention to. The Bush administration may have named Lukashenko the “last dictator in Europe” and “an outpost of tyranny” as long ago as 2005, but the country has never been high on anyone’s list of states due for regime change, whether driven from within or imposed from without.

Until now, that is. As Lukashenko approaches his sixth election on 9^th August, he is suddenly facing something he is unaccustomed to: opposition. Multiple rivals have risen up to challenge him, while the usually sedate capital, Minsk, has seen major street protests. All kinds of reasons have been cited for the unrest, ranging from economic stagnation to his eccentric response to Covid (don’t worry, drink vodka) — although the fact that he’s been in charge since Clydebank’s own Wet Wet Wet were topping the charts with “Love is All Around” is probably enough to make anybody a bit weary. One unofficial Internet poll has his support at 6%. Another places it at 3%.

As a Lukashenko-watcher since 1997 I was, like the president himself, caught off-guard by these sudden developments. But does this mean that we should expect Ukraine-style upheaval? How to interpret this sudden flurry of reporting from journalists located in the countries next door? Will the bells of freedom ring, as they did for Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan in 2004 and 2005 (and then again for Ukraine in 2014)?

Perhaps; yet it must be noted that Belarus has stubbornly gone its own way for a long time now. Although its predecessor state, the Byelorussian SSR, was part of the triumvirate of republics that dissolved the USSR in December 1991 without bothering to consult any of the others, it has, since those heady days, pursued a more conservative course than Russia and Ukraine, its partners in dissolution. Whereas the Russians put up with 10 years of lawlessness and corruption before electing a strongman to bring “order and stability”, and Ukraine has put up with 30 years of lawlessness and corruption and is yet to succumb to the temptation of electing a strongman, Belarus went for a strongman the very first time it held a presidential election.

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But unlike the near-teetotal judo enthusiast Putin, Lukashenko was a very conventional type of strongman, already retro in 1994. With his combover and thick moustache he was the perfect image of a Soviet regional boss, as if he had been cloned in a test tube kept on a shelf at a dacha between a jar of pickles and a bottle of home made vodka that made grandpa go blind.

Born in 1954, Lukashenko came of age during Brezhnev’s era of stagnation. He studied at a teaching institute and agricultural academy, did a stint in the Red Army, and then worked as a manager on collective farms while plodding his way through a political career that led to him entering the Byelorussian parliament in 1990 — an inauspicious year to be elected a communist deputy, to be sure.

Lukashenko, in fact, was not at all keen on this whole independence thing. He opposed the break-up of the USSR and retained close contacts with the Russian communist party; in 1994 he addressed the Russian parliament and called for the creation of a new union of Slavic states. Lukashenko was less of a friend-to-oligarchs type and more of a state power type, seeking to preserve the USSR he had grown up in like one of those mammoths you occasionally find intact in a block of ice in Siberia.

There was to be no sudden privatisation; no flirting with NATO; no rebranding of the KGB; Russian, spoken by the majority of the country’s people, although a minority speak the closely-related Belorusian at home, would remain an official language, and the president gave all his speeches in it; Lukaschenko continued to pursue close ties with Russia, and in 1999 he and Yeltsin signed a “Treaty on the Creation of a Union State”, as if the course of history could be reversed at least a little bit.

The treaty was rather vague and hasn’t led to much. I was living in Russia at the time and Lukashenko’s passion seemed unrequited; not once did I hear a Russian yearn for the restoration of Belarus as they often did the Crimea. That said, his commitment to preserving Brezhnevian stagnation won the respect of some. Democracy had become a dirty word — demokratiya mocked as dermokratiya, or”shitocracy” — to the millions who had been swindled by so-called reformers and carpetbagging westerners. I remember talking to a Russian friend who had just returned from a trip to Minsk, the capital. “I hear it’s very soviet,” I said, assuming that he would go on a tirade against the dictator. “Yes,” he said. “It’s very good.”

And so Lukashenko was quite successful for a while, avoiding risk while delivering a stable, endurable poverty to his people, a task beyond many post-Soviet leaders. He told the BBC in 2012: “I would not say what happened in Russia in the 1990s was democracy, it was anarchy… we managed to nip these anarchic tendencies in the bud, we saved the country…” Lukashenko’s paternalistic approach earned him the nickname of “batka” — father.

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His Soviet style was a strength in other ways: Europe’s last dictator he might have been, but he came from the tradition of dull Eastern European despots whose names and faces you can’t quite remember unless, for some reason, you take an interest in these things. Unlike Kim Jong-il he wasn’t a megalomaniac intent on starving his people into submission while drinking cognac and collecting nuclear warheads. The success of his policy of sustained dullness can be measured by a quick look at the archives of Vice which has 5,594 articles on North Korea and 149 videos compared to 29 articles and no videos on Belarus. If you’re boring, nobody cares; you’ll be left to your own devices.

Still, too much power for too long can do things even to the most tedious of dictators. I first suspected things were going to Lukashenko’s head in 2011 when he started taking his then 7-year-old son along with him to meetings with heads of state. Wee Kolya Lukashenko got to meet Pope Benedict and the Obamas and many other world leaders. Clearly disappointed by the adult sons his wife had borne him, Lukashenko was grooming his mini Slav sun king, whose mother was unknown, for power. When asked whether that was the case, Lukashenko responded with deadpan dictator humor: the boy was just very affectionate towards his father, he told the BBC, and couldn’t even go to sleep without him.

But this was not actually a sign of anything much: Lukashenko remained cautious and conservative. When Putin annexed the Crimea, he gave his first ever speech in Belarusian and attempted to distance himself from his powerful patron, but before long he was holding joint drills with Russia again. Earlier this year in a fight over energy prices with Russia he bought some Norwegian oil and invited Mike Pompeo to Minsk, but he was still a long way from the bitter exchanges that characterise Russia’s relations with Ukraine.

When the pandemic hit Belarus he was dismissive, suggested treating the disease by drinking vodka and went ahead with a Victory Day parade — but he was not the only leader to be dismissive of coronavirus; Boris Johnson was still boasting that he would keep shaking hands until not too long before he came down with a bad case of Covid-19 himself. (As it turned out, Lukashenko also contracted the virus, he now admits.)

In fact, it wasn’t rebellion against a grandiose act of eccentricity or tyranny that kicked off the open opposition this most retro of dictators now faces. Rather, the dam seems to have burst when a popular YouTuber, Sergei Tikhanovsky, cracked a gag about Lukashenko’s moustache, comparing it to a cockroach, and then took to driving around in a van with a giant slipper — the most popular form of pest control in the country — on it. All of a sudden, protestors took to the streets of Minsk with slippers in hand and foreign analysts were talking up a potential “slipper revolution.”

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Tikhanovsky was tossed in prison, and he was swiftly joined behind bars by another opposition figure, Viktor Babariko, a 56-year-old former banker (not a trade typically associated with great probity in the former USSR, it must be said, and especially not when the bank is a branch of Russia’s Gazprombank). He was arrested before he could lodge his application to run for president, accused of financial crimes. Babariko’s arrest provoked outrage; protestors formed a two-mile human chain across Minsk. Another opposition leader, Valery Tsapkalo, also an erstwhile pillar of the regime like Babariko (he was previously ambassador to the US), fled to Russia with his two sons.

However, having neutralized these three men, their wives then united on a joint ticket to challenge Lukashenko. There are reports of opposition rallies outside the capital, in the cities of Grodno, Gomel and Brest. All of a sudden Belarus is not quite so dull and it seems that Lukashenko’s strategy of indefinitely extending the stagnation he grew up with may not be quite so tenable after all, especially as a new generation comes of age that has no memory of the Soviet Union, or even the chaotic 1990s, that were so chaotic elsewhere.

Lukashenko still has many levers at his disposal: throwing people in prison is usually an effective means of intimidation, as is going after their jobs (as Woke mobs know), and so is threatening their families. He blames nefarious foreign agents and has vowed that Belarus will not succumb to a Ukrainian-style revolution. And short of a mass uprising in which he suddenly loses control of the police or the army, I suspect he will be around for a while yet. But getting elected will never again be quite so easy, the romp home will be less convincing than before, and his KGB will be very, very busy for a long time to come. Lukashenko: still retro after all these years, only now with extra brutality.