But Belarus’s eager acceptance of Donald Trump’s invitation to be a founder member of his Board of Peace — “one of the most consequential bodies ever created in the history of the world,” apparently — tells a different story. Lukashenko has always been deft at playing Russia and Europe against each other for his own benefit and these skills ought to serve him well in any new Trumpian world order. Not only is America newly receptive to authoritarian leaders like him; the prospect of now playing America off against its former European allies and meanwhile assuming a key role within the new Russian world will play to the strengths of a leader who is a far cannier political operator than is commonly assumed.

It is, after all, no accident that Lukashenko, now 71, is the most enduring political survivor in the Russian sphere — no small feat in a landscape full of car bombs, plane accidents, and defenestrations. Indeed, in February 1997, while Boris Yeltsin was recovering from heart surgery, Lukashenko almost became leader of Russia itself.

Six years on from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia had bid farewell to one political order, but had yet to give birth to the next. Yeltsin’s popularity was floundering. In a bid to exploit the wave of lingering Soviet nostalgia among the Russian masses — and to show strength as several former Warsaw Pact states joined Nato — Yeltsin made a play to pull Belarus even closer into Russia’s orbit. He set in motion the creation of the “Union State”, a confederation between Russia and Belarus that was supposed to inspire the likes of Kazakhstan and Ukraine to deepen their reliance on Moscow too.

Suggested Reading

What Putin does next

By Michal Kranz

Lukashenko, who had quickly consolidated power in Belarus after winning the first (and thus far only) free and fair election in the country’s history in 1994, had other plans. He and his deputies drafted up a treaty that effectively gave Lukashenko perpetual control of the Supreme Council of the future Union State — a kind of reverse takeover that meant he would succeed Yeltsin at the head of Russia’s political hierarchy.

“What the drafters came up with essentially meant one thing: Russia was losing its sovereignty,” Yeltsin later wrote in his memoir. In a diplomatic flurry of existential proportions, the Russian leader dispatched his officials to Minsk to intercept the document and talk Lukashenko out of his plan. It took an entire night of negotiations — and according to Yeltsin, lots of liquor — to get the job done.

Lukashenko only truly gave up his designs on the Kremlin once Putin rose to power in 2000 — and the Union State treaty that he ultimately signed has mostly been used by Russia as a means to absorb Belarus rather than the other way around. However, Lukashenko’s ambitions of power and influence have persisted in other, more subtle forms. And as Trump has laid the groundwork for an American rapprochement with Moscow over Ukraine, the Belarusian strongman has found himself on the precipice of yet another generational inflection point. American interests are reorienting away from Europe; and the rise of a new transactional, Trumpian logic in international affairs is reshaping not only America’s role in the world, but Russia’s as well.

Naturally, Lukashenko has jumped at the chance to get in on the action. Belarus’s place on the so-called Board of Peace is the clearest evidence yet of a thaw with Washington — the first since 2020, when Europe and the US ousted him from their good graces following his brutal crackdown on anti-government protests in Belarus. Last year, through several deals with the US, Lukashenko traded 175 political prisoners for sanctions relief, most recently releasing 123 people including several high-profile activists and politicians in exchange for the elimination of American sanctions on the critical Belarusian potash sector.

The immediate benefits to his regime are obvious — an opening for renewed trade with the US and diplomatic legitimization on the world stage, with Lukashenko positioning himself a one-of-a-kind liaison to the Kremlin during any peace process between Russia and Ukraine. But despite his frequent chest-thumping, Lukashenko is no Trump, and his designs go far beyond short-term dealmaking. As a new world order is born out of the tragedy of Ukraine, Lukashenko understands that not only that Trump might end his ostracism from the West, but that this is his best shot to transform himself from Putin’s underling into his right-hand man.

And a Russo-American grand bargain would do more than allow Lukashanko to ride to freedom on Putin’s coattails — it would allow him to make deals with the Americans on his own terms. At the same time, by engaging with Trump and continuing to harass the EU, Lukashenko can drive an even deeper wedge between the US and its former European allies — thus creating the foundation for a new order. The EU, with its lofty goals of democratization and justice in Belarus, will be left out in the cold. An agnostic US will meanwhile build new ties with Lukashenko and a newly victorious, post-war Russian sphere.

Despite being a pariah on the continent for the better part of 25 years even before 2020, Lukashenko had been surprisingly effective at maintaining ties to liberal Europe — while doing comparatively little to reform his dictatorship in return. Time and time again, the EU allowed itself to be deceived by Lukashenko into thinking he could change — a naïveté that he exploited to keep his masters in the Kremlin far enough at bay to keep them from swallowing him whole. In 2008, having watched Putin’s tanks roll into Georgia, Lukashenko secured a window to the West for himself by freeing several political prisoners, leading the EU to lift a travel ban against him — only to spark Brussels’ ire anew by violently suppressing post-election protests in Minsk two years later. In 2015 the story repeated itself. Lukashenko came under pressure from Putin to establish a Russian military base on Belarusian territory, leading him to release more prisoners in exchange for the EU unfreezing his assets and eliminating other sanctions. While Belarus and Russia were in the midst of an oil and gas dispute in 2019, Lukashenko visited Vienna, marking his first visit to the EU in years.

The house of cards came crashing down in 2020 when Lukashenko’s crackdown on post-election protests transformed both Belarusian society and his regime. Feeling more threatened than ever by his own people, Lukashenko pursued his enemies with relentless fury, infamously forcing a Ryanair passenger plane to land in Minsk to arrest Belarusian activist Roman Protasevich who was on board.

For Europe, this was the final straw, and Lukashenko has found himself permanently locked out of the West ever since — more at Putin’s mercy than ever before. And while his 2020 crackdown allowed him to hold onto power in Belarus, he paid for it by watching his worst nightmares about Russian power in Belarus manifest before his eyes. Despite having broken with the Kremlin line on Crimea in 2014, calling it a “bad precedent,” Lukashenko now had no choice but to allow his country to be used as a staging ground for Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and thus a co-aggressor. Although he resisted pressure to conscript Belarusians themselves to join the war, in a major move, he allowed Russia to station nuclear-capable Oreshnik ballistic missiles in Belarus late last month.

Of course, Lukashenko is hardly interested in the welfare of Belarus as a country — and only cares about the instruments of its state insofar as they allow him to achieve his personal goals. As a product of the Soviet bureaucratic machine, he has always ultimately seen Moscow as his center of gravity — and despite his distrust of Putin, he has played the part of his enforcer well.

Now that the Trump administration has arrived on the scene with offers that Europe is no longer willing to make, Lukashenko has bifurcated his policy toward a divided West. Washington, rather than Brussels, is now his insurance policy against Putin. Even while drawing closer to Trump, Lukashenko has continued to antagonize the EU, triggering a state of emergency in Lithuania last month after sending smuggler balloons over the border. In effect then, by courting the Americans, Lukashenko has been helping Putin articulate an ultimatum to the EU. Sanctions on Belarus and Russia and support for Ukraine will be met with gray-zone warfare and instability along Nato’s frontier. Legitimization, sanctions relief, and negotiation with the Kremlin via Minsk will be met with business opportunities, humanitarian releases of Belarus’s oppressed — and peace along Europe’s frontiers.

Meanwhile, like two lovers stuck in a bad marriage, Putin is nearly as dependent on Lukashenko as he is on him. The Belarusian leader has done everything in his power to underscore this fact since the start of the war in Ukraine — in 2023 after all, Lukashenko negotiated a deal between the Kremlin and Yevgeny Prigozhin during the latter’s march on Moscow, casting himself as Putin’s savior.

And within Trump’s imagined new order, Lukashenko sees a place for himself as an equal to the Russian leader. Moscow is hoping to reestablish its influence on its “near-abroad” after the dust settles in Ukraine — and as Putin’s most important international ally, Lukashenko already forms the lynchpin of the Russkiy Mir (that is, the Russian world). He has already done his best to support loyal regimes like Georgia’s and to corral wayward allies like Armenia and Kazakhstan back into the flock.

And despite thumbing their nose at him a few years ago — Kazakhstan’s President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev called Lukashenko’s suggestion that his country join the Union State a “joke” in 2023 — these states seem to have reluctantly come around to the notion that they will have to continue appeasing the Russian bully one way or another. Kazakhstan and Belarus strengthened their military ties in 2025 less than a year after Lukashenko chided his Kazakh counterpart for not being more involved in Russia’s war in Ukraine. The Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan once said he would never visit Belarus as long as Lukashenko reigns; nevertheless the pair met and shook hands in Moscow last year.

Suggested Reading

Trump is losing the European Right

By Mary Harrington

Of course, all of this is only made possible by Lukashenko’s Orwellian oppression of the Belarusian populace — which goes beyond even Putin’s authoritarian chokehold on the Russian masses. The prisoner deals with the EU and now Trump have taught Lukashenko that imprisoning his own people not only helps him stay in power, but gives him a bargaining chip. “We are basically goods for sale,” said the Nobel Peace laureate Ales Bialiatski who was freed as part of the most recent prisoner release in December. Moreover, with over 1,100 political prisoners (and counting) still behind bars in the country, Lukashenko still has plenty of human “goods” to sell the West. Once he runs out, he will surely arrest more to keep the train rolling.

Naturally, given its borders with three EU countries, Belarus still needs Europe. Trump’s recent removal of sanctions on potash means little if Belarus has no means to export them. And however desperate Putin may be, sharing power is not something he has ever been keen on — especially with a fair-weather friend like Lukashenko. But the world is changing and the Russkiy Mir is changing too. Putin is tightening his belt. The war in Ukraine has now stretched on for longer than the USSR’s Great Patriotic War against the Nazis. He will need a stable bulwark as he reconstitutes his forces and his political capital — and Lukashenko will doubtlessly be there to save him once again. Indeed, the Belarusian dictator will have secured the very balance he has always desired: power beyond his own borders, plus his own fiefdom, army, and intelligence services within them.

Whether this dream ever manifests is anyone’s guess — and it will depend enormously on what the world looks like once the guns fall silent in Ukraine. Moreover, it is hard to imagine Lukashenko could achieve this without further sacrificing Belarus’s independence. But Lukashenko changed his calculus after 2020 and he may be happy to do the same again, so long as he finds himself where he has always wanted to be — in the halls of power of the former Soviet world that molded him. Yeltsin may have stopped Lukashenko from taking over Russia back in 1997. But he was never able to stop him from trying to restore his place at the heart of the Russian world.

The defacement of Kropka was not an isolated incident. Around the same time, similar graffiti appeared in front of the office of an NGO providing assistance to Belarusian refugees, even as a Belarusian cultural center in Vilnius was vandalized, and an air gun was fired at a Belarusian Orthodox chapel in the Lithuanian capital, leaving bullet holes in its grill-guarded glass windows. If, however, Furmanaŭ was momentarily terrified as the assault on his shop, recalling the ethnic cleansing and genocide that devoured the Baltics in the Second World War, the former Belarusian political prisoner soon realized what he was really looking at, realizing the assault was a “provocation” by the Lukashenko regime.

In April, Lithuania’s State Security Department (VSD) confirmed what Furmanaŭ had suspected — that this string of incidents had indeed been the work of Putin and his Belarusian stooge Alexander Lukashenko. Yet according to the agency, Belarusian and Russian intelligence services have now gone even further, and had started recruiting individuals to ambush and assault Belarusian students living in Lithuania, and to film themselves carrying out other violent attacks elsewhere in the country.

Three years since the start of the war in Ukraine, and four since the beginning of Lukashenko’s manufactured migration crisis along Belarus’s borders with Nato, such activity might seem hardly surprising. In March, to give one example, Lithuania accused Russia’s GRU of conducting an arson attack on an Ikea in the country. But while these local, socially incendiary, and much less high-profile actions might seem innocuous by comparison, there is much more going on in Vilnius than mere vandalism. Attacks like the one against Kropka are the real-world manifestation of a long-running fight over identity. Increasingly stoked by Moscow and Minsk, it’s now playing out on a potent historical battlefield: the legacy of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

The multi-ethnic and pluralistic character of the Grand Duchy, which endured for centuries until its destruction in the late 18th century, has since given rise to a uniquely Eastern European problem. Despite its name, the fact that the state encompassed not only modern Lithuania but all of today’s Belarus means it does not easily fit into the rigid boxes of 20th century nationalism. In a region where history bestows legitimacy, the battle over who owns the inheritance of the Grand Duchy carries implications not just for how Lithuanians and Belarusians see themselves, but what territory they have the right to control.

More from this author

Trump never wanted peace in Ukraine

By Michal Kranz

It is no surprise, then, that this niche corner of history has become fertile soil for geopolitical manipulation by the Kremlin and its allies, whose campaign of hybrid attacks in Vilnius aims to provoke an ethnic conflict between Lithuanians and Belarusians. In this, however, Lithuania is just the tip of the iceberg. Putinist efforts to use history to foment chaos in Vilnius are a hallmark of the Kremlin’s playbook elsewhere in the region, and a means of extending Putin’s soft power at his rivals’ expense. “These attacks are a blow not only to the safety of Belarusians in Lithuania, but also to the trust and unity between communities,” Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the head of the Belarusian democratic opposition tells UnHerd. “Attacking its history, its democracy, its role in the EU and Nato — it’s all part of the same imperialist playbook.”

At the core of Putin and Lukashenko’s hybrid warfare lies an ideology called Litvinism, whose most radical fringe claim that modern Lithuanians are in fact a different people entirely than the ones who dominated the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — and that therefore Vilnius should rightfully belong to Belarus. To that end, graffiti with slogans like “Vilnius is ours!” began appearing in the city last year, while in late 2023 a video even surfaced of self-described Litvinists threatening Lithuanian politicians.

“Historical conflict and historical misunderstandings offer very good ground, especially in Eastern Europe for hostility among nations,” says Vadim Vileita, a Lithuanian political scientist and linguist with Belarusian roots. “This situation with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the legacy of this old state is one of the examples of how a common heritage can not unite, but divide nations, especially in difficult geopolitical situations.”

Certainly, the Grand Duchy itself was a place of contradictions. Led by largely pagan Lithuanian leaders, in the 13th century they dramatically expanded the polity’s borders. Soon enough, their borders stretched across modern Poland, Belarus and Ukraine into Russia itself, with many of their subjects Orthodox Slavs. After the Grand Duchy and Poland fell under the sway of the same royal house, in 1386, laying the foundation for the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth two centuries later, pagan Lithuanian leaders adopted Roman Catholicism and were crowned as Polish kings. While the Lithuanian language continued to be spoken on the territory of Lithuania proper, the dominant language of literature and administration in the Grand Duchy became Ruthenian, an East Slavic language similar to modern Ukrainian and Belarusian. As if this multicultural maelstrom wasn’t enough, the Lithuanian nobility was increasingly Polonised, even as the country’s laws were drafted in Latin.

None of this would survive the convulsions of nationalism. By 1918, indeed, it would be the Poles who weaponised Litvinism, as they fought to establish the northeastern borders of the Second Polish Republic. In their view, it was Polonised inhabitants of Lithuania, who called themselves Litwini, who were the real heirs of the Grand Duchy — distinct, they claimed, from the Baltic Lithuanians trying to use the mantle of this history to carve out their own modern state. It was under this pretext that Polish General Lucjan Żeligowski captured Vilnius in 1920 and annexed it to the new Polish Republic. Never mind that Żeligowski considered himself to be a Polish Lithuanian, and indeed grew up speaking a dialect of Belarusian.

In its more modern guise, however, it is Belarusians who have assumed the mantle of Litvinism. Though adherents today hold a spectrum of views, the most extreme believers see the modern Lithuanian state as a usurper of the Grand Duchy’s legacy. By extension, that means Belarusians have the right not just to the duchy’s heritage — but also to cities like Vilnius. Just like in the past, these ideas didn’t spread organically. According to Nerijus Maliukevičius, a political scientist at Vilnius University, Litvinism remained “marginal” in Lithuanian discourse until around 2020, when an influx of Belarusians into Lithuania provided Minsk with a chance to sow mischief.

That’s ironic. For though 57,000 Belarusians live in Lithuania, most of them loathe the Lukashenko regime and indeed fled Belarus for their own safety. Yet if few Belarusians have ever even heard of Litvinism, let alone support seizing Vilnius for themselves, that hasn’t stopped Lukashenko from using history to instrumentalise elements of the Belarusian diaspora, alongside other Russian speakers in the country, to carry out his dirty work. It’s unlikely that these saboteurs-for-hire are political hardliners. Rather, they’re mostly cash-strapped individuals eager for work, providing Lukashenko with a fertile base for exploitation. “He’s a huge opportunist, that’s not a surprise,” says Hanna Liubakova, a Vilnius-based dissident who fled Belarus and now serves as a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

As so often, though, history rushes in to complicate things once more. Lukashenko, for his part, is an undiluted product of Soviet Belarus, viewing his country’s history through a distinctly Russian lens. In this Sovietised historiography, Belarusians, as Moscow’s long-lost Slavic brothers, were rescued from oppression first by the Tsar and then by Stalin.

In other words, then, Minsk’s embrace of Litvinism in Lithuania is less an ideological position than a cold, calculated cudgel of realpolitik. Even so, it is precisely Lukashenko’s Soviet heritage that has made connections to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania so appealing in the eyes of many opposition-minded Belarusians, a minority of whom have sometimes embraced Litvinist ideas themselves. Figures like Zianon Pazniak, who fled Belarus out of fear of arrest by Lukashenko in the Nineties, have made statements denouncing the modern Lithuanian state — in their eyes, Litvinism distances Belarus from Russia, but also twists Lithuania into a usurper of stolen Belarusian glory.

As Liubakova says, such people are a small minority in the Belarusian opposition. But as the Litvinist threat continues to rise, Belarusians in Lithuania are increasingly seen as a menace. The Lithuanian state last year revoked the residence permits of around 600 Belarusian on national security grounds, while the country’s spies have increased screenings of Belarusian residents. And while Lithuania’s leaders have largely welcomed the foreigners in their midst, some politicians say it’s better to be safe than sorry.

“We have no problems with Belarusians if Belarusians respect our country,” Laurynas Kasčiūnas, an MP and former defense minister, tells UnHerd. “Not all Belarusians in Lithuania are democratic, we have economic migrants, we have other people who could be used by the regime for different reasons.” Kasčiūnas recently introduced a law that will allow the state to revoke the residency of Russians who travel to Russia or Belarus over three times a month without clear reasons. Though he stresses he doesn’t have the political backing to do so, he tells UnHerd he’d have liked to extend the law to Belarusians living in Lithuania too. Though such moves by the Lithuanian state would potentially make it easier to weed out Belarusians susceptible to Lukashenko’s schemes, they could conceivably also play into his propaganda, making it easier for him to drive a wedge between Lithuanians and Belarusians.

Amid the bickering over Litvinism, meanwhile, Lithuania has much bigger fish to fry. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently wrote a foreword to a book arguing that modern Lithuania is an artificial state built on “pro-Nazi” ideology. According to Lavrov, meanwhile, the Vilnius government has “elevated the use of falsified historical narratives to the rank of state policy to stimulate anti-Russian and Russophobic sentiments.”

More from this author

Extremists are coming for Poland

By Michal Kranz

Though such narratives are hardly new, it’s hard not to be reminded of Putin’s infamous 2021 essay about Ukraine. Through a selective reading of history, it makes the case that Ukrainian national identity is actually just a Westernized version of Russianness promoted by Nazis, serving as a prelude to his invasion of the country. Lithuania isn’t taking any chances — in addition to unveiling plans for a wholesale evacuation of Vilnius in the event of a Russian invasion, Lithuania is also upgrading its military transport routes to Poland via the strategic Suwałki Gap. Led by Kasčiūnas, lawmakers in parliament have also proposed following Poland’s example and building a line of fortifications along the country’s borders with Russia and Belarus.

Nor, of course, is Lithuania the only place where Russia has combined historical revisionism with hybrid attacks to make a real impact on national politics. Aside from the extreme example of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has also claimed that Moldova is an artificial state bound to Russia, undermining the security of this increasingly pro-Western state. Though the Kremlin has long organized acts of hybrid warfare and spread historical disinformation in Poland, it has yet to combine the two. But just like segments of Lithuania’s Belarusian community, Moscow may eventually encourage Poland’s large Ukrainian population to undermine the state there too, inspired by the bloody legacy of the Second World War. “The genius of this strategy, in a sense, is that you don’t need to artificially create these divisions,” Maliukevičiuss says. “They objectively exist in each society, and you just work hard on them.”

Not that the situation is hopeless. Despite Putin and Lukashenko’s best efforts, and the Lithuanian state’s countermeasures, Belarusians here mostly feel at home. For her part, Liubakova underscores how much Vilnius is doing to support Belarusians at home while putting pressure on Lukashenko’s regime abroad — something Furmanaŭ, the co-owner of Kropka, was “pleasantly surprised” to experience himself. Though the assailants remain mysterious, local politicians expressed full-throated support for the Furmanaŭs in the aftermath of last July’s attack.

Though Litvinism therefore exists on the sidelines of the Belarusian community, both in Lithuania and elsewhere, what many Belarusians ultimately crave is a new perspective on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — with a historical legacy that can be shared by Belarusians and Lithuanians alike. As Belarusians continue refining their own national self-image, after all, the Grand Duchy not only gives them an anchor to a shared regional past, it also helps them escape the Kremlin’s shadow. Whatever their varied historical grievances, that’s something most Eastern Europeans today can surely understand.

I’m in Puchły, at the Church of the Protection of the Mother of God, wooden, dark blue, and completed in 1918. The church is small and the village smaller: officially Puchły has a population of 42, but even that feels generous. Yet in tiny places like these, in the region of Podlasie, a whole forgotten world comes to life. For in this corner of northeast Poland, famed for its forests and its rare herds of wild bison, you can uncover a diversity mostly lost to Eastern Europe.

Those old ladies, after all, do not mumble in Polish, but in Podlachian, a microlanguage far closer to Belarusian and Ukrainian. Unusually for the homeland of Pope John Paul II, the babcias aren’t Catholic either. As the Cyrillic blessing on the archway of the Church of the Protection implies, the people here are Eastern Orthodox, sharing the Podlasie countryside with Lithuanians, Muslim Lipka Tatars, Jews. Some locals even continue to rely on szeptuns, folk healers who blend Orthodox and pagan practices. No wonder many Podlachian refer to their nationality simply as tutejsi — “from here”.

Over recent decades, though, people here have been under rising pressure to be from somewhere, the remorseless logic of nationalism pushing them to be Polish, or Belarusian, or even Russian. That’s especially true now, as literal walls go up right across Podlasie, and governments across the region prepare for future bloodshed. Yet that hardly means Puchły and its people are anachronistic, forgotten and marooned as the continent rearms. On the contrary, its borderless identity evokes both the deep past of Eastern Europe — and reminds us that another future is possible.

Places like Puchły were fired by history. Located in the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose eastern lands were once known as Ruthenia, Podlasie was a place where varied identities could coexist without contradiction. This wasn’t due to some magnanimous vision of pluralism, but simply a reflection of reality. In the 16th century, the Catholic kings of the Commonwealth spoke Polish, a West Slavic language related to Czech. But most of their subjects spoke East Slavic tongues like Podlachian, and practiced Eastern Orthodoxy.

More from this author

Can Poland ever forgive Ukraine?

By Michal Kranz

Jews and Muslims were welcomed as merchants and warriors respectively, integrated as yet another layer in this complex society. One excellent example of the multifaceted nature of identity in Eastern Europe is the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz. Born in modern Belarus, to a family with probable Jewish roots, he began his famous Polish-language epic Pan Tadeusz: “Lithuania! My fatherland!”

To a certain extent, this cultural richness endures in Podlasie. “On a daily basis, we speak Polish,” says Daria, a young Puchły parishioner, her light brown hair covered with a blue headscarf. “Or, like many in Podlasie, we speak po svojomu.” The phrase means “in our own way” — but though Daria is referring to the Podlachian language, it’s an elegant stand-in for the region’s broader identity. “For me, being from Podlasie, being Orthodox, is being someone who sticks to his own,” says Roman Ostapczuk, head of the nearby Koweła village, chomping on home-cured sausages and horseradish, an icon of the Virgin Mary hanging above our heads.

Nor do you have to speak Podlachian, or even be especially religious, to spot Podlachian pride. Puchły is one of several villages in a microregion evocatively known as the Land of Open Shutters. Here, houses, churches, and even bus stops feature ornately carved patterns, their wooden shutters painted the colors of the rainbow. Orthodox crosses guard the entrance of every village, while carved figurines adorn windowsills and shelves. Other cultural practices are distinctive too. Village choirs sing “in voices” — a style of belted singing typical of the region.

It’s tempting, then, to see this place as a kind of Disneyland of Slavic folklore. But that’d be wrong — and not just because there isn’t a tourist in sight. For if the long-dead Commonwealth was broadly indulgent of religious and ethnic diversity, recent decades have been far less gentle on Podlasie. During the interwar period, over a hundred Orthodox churches were destroyed by Polish authorities across the country. As the state religion of Tsarist Russia, an empire that had occupied parts of Poland for centuries, they were razed as an alien presence.

Despite enduring deportation to Siberia at the hands of invading Soviet forces from 1939, just like their Catholic compatriots, Orthodox communities in Podlasie were also targets of a racist “pacification” campaign once the Second World War was over. Led by rogue officer Romuald Rajs — nicknamed Bury, meaning “dark” or “grey” — a group of Polish partisans killed dozens of Orthodox civilians right across Podlasie, burning villages as they went. One middle-aged woman I met recalls being unwilling to even admit she was Orthodox as recently as several decades ago, for fear of being mocked as a kacapy: a Polish slur for Russians.

To be sure, Rajs’s actions were condemned by his superiors, and described as genocide by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance in 2005. But the age of nationalism isn’t easy to escape, with an extremist Polish fringe lately recasting Bury as a freedom fighter. And, in 2019, under the auspices of the Right-wing and strongly Catholic Law and Justice Party (PiS), the Institute of National Remembrance walked back on its earlier conclusions about Bury’s butchery. Not to be outdone, nationalists from across Poland have held annual marches in Hajnówka, ostensibly to honour various anti-communist fighters. But chants of “Bury, our hero” inevitably abound.

There are more contemporary geopolitical pressures here too. Before 1939, Poland’s borders extended deep into modern-day Belarus, placing Podlachian side-by-side with their Belarusian kin inside a single state. But the creation of a hard border, when Belarus became part of the USSR in 1945, separated mothers from sons, and villages that once shared a life ended up in different countries. More recent developments have spurred division too. Responding to a migration crisis, artificially set in motion by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Poland has erected a five-and-a-half-meter tall wall along its eastern frontier. Warsaw has also started a network of fortifications, and withdrawn from an international convention against anti-personnel mines, to guard against future Russian attacks.

These tensions show up in politics. Despite the traditional values of locals, the county town of Hajnówka has for decades voted for center-left parties in national elections. That’s in stark contrast to most of Poland’s east, where the PiS enjoys ironclad support. Beyond the electoral map, though, you really feel this opposition to PiS’s national vision from Podlachian themselves.

“I am not a Pole,” says Wiktor Stachwiuk, an author and philologist in Trześcianka, a village near Puchły. “I am a Belarusian, a Ruthenian from Podlasie.” Surrounded by a kingdom of manuscripts in his orange-shuttered living room, pouring generous shots of plum moonshine as he goes, Stachwiuk suggests that the Catholic Poles have “connected themselves mentally” with the West, preferring to be “with the British” than their Slavic cousins. Though he emphasizes he’s fervently opposed to the regimes of Putin in Russia and Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, he laments the distance political borders in the region have created between him and and his brethren to the east.

Other Podlachians have gone the other way: citing their long presence on Polish soil, they’ve situated their unique local identity within a broader loyalty to the Polish nation. Either way, such attitudes are probably an inevitable consequence of the region’s hard borders — and of the forces, on both sides of the fence, that see Poland as a Catholic country with little space for Orthodox Podlachians. It hardly helps, of course, that the clergy itself has arguably muddied the waters. In early 2023, the head of the Polish Orthodox Church set off a media storm when he appeared to condemn Ukraine’s moves to establish its own separate church from Russia. Amid the backlash, Metropolitan Sawa was forced to apologize, denouncing Putin’s “criminal” invasion of Ukraine.

Unease is also heightened by the sense that Podlachian culture is at risk of vanishing altogether. When he was young, Ostapczuk recalls learning Polish as a foreign language. Now, though, the number of Podlachian speakers dwindles with each passing generation, and the number of people actively writing in it can be counted on two hands. Ostapczuk adds that his children today live their lives in Polish first and foremost, seeing Podlachian as a language tied to the home. For writers like Stachwiuk, then, putting the language to paper is not just about developing its literary tradition — it’s about giving Podlachian a kind of immortality. “This exists,” he proudly declares, showing me a book he wrote entirely in Podlachian.

Not that everyone here feels drawn to binary national labels that place Podlachian identity in opposition to Polishness. One example is Ostapczuk, who emphasizes he doesn’t want to be “pigeon-holed” as Belarusian — whatever language he grew up speaking. The historian and ethnographer Doroteusz Fionik has a name for this more intimate form of belonging. “The little fatherland is that place where a person feels best,” he says. “For the little fatherland, there are none of today’s state borders. The person doesn’t endeavor for those borders to change, the person just wants to be able to live comfortably in the place where he exists.”

Once again, history offers a guide here. Set amid the gentle bluffs north of Puchły, the Supraśl Orthodox Monastery is perhaps the most spectacular expression of the deep bonds between Poland and its Orthodox community. First built in 1503, all lofty towers and vaunted ceilings, the monastery’s Belarusian Gothic interior is dazzlingly ornate. At the back of the nave are vivid frescos showing the End of Days. Tellingly, the space features icons depicting both Orthodox and Catholic saints, while the monastery’s choral tradition combines Byzantine and Latin influences.

Suggested reading

Inside Poland's far-Right's Catholic revival

By Mateusz Mazzini

In fact, the new church was only built in the Eighties, at the tail end of communist rule, after the original monastery was destroyed by the retreating Wehrmacht in 1944. Yet even that speaks to Supraśl’s hybrid identity. According to Brother Jan, a monk at the monastery, the Germans targeted this monument to Orthodoxy not to spite the Russians — but because they saw it as an expression of Polish identity that needed to be crushed. As Jan puts it: “This place was supposed to highlight what unites us, not what divides us.”

And if Supraśl has reemerged from the ashes of Poland’s bloody 20th century, there are other signs, too, that the “little fatherland” endures. Podlasie now boasts a pair of Belarusian language schools, and though younger generations may not speak po svojomu as much as their parents, activists like Stachwiuk are fighting to keep the tongue alive. Revivalists scored a major win when a song by a local duo, written in Podlachian, made it to the final round of Poland’s qualifications for Eurovision — the first time most Poles had ever been exposed to the language.

Yet as usual in this corner of Poland, politics threatens to smash this fragile identity. With growing heterogeneity within, and mounting threats without, the old Polish temptation to draw lines in the sand is starting to rear its head once again, with many urging loyalty to a single national ideal. For the country’s far-Right, gaining in polls ahead of presidential elections in May, the multifaceted landscape of Podlasie poses a challenge to their “us” and “them” vision of modern Poland.

Despite a respite of two years, ultranationalists returned to Hajnówka last month to hold yet another parade honoring the partisans who fought in the region — with Bury among them. Supporters of the far-Right Confederation Party came to protest the establishment of integration centers for foreigners in the region, a move funded by the Podlasie regional government and backed by many locals who view it as an expression of their historic openness to multiculturalism. And, after that Podlachian song’s success in Eurovision, the contest again turned into a theatre for nationalistic chest-beating, with online Rightists tying the language to Russia and Ukraine, calling it an attempt to “Ukrainianise” Poland.

But here, in Podlasie, the tutejsi know another way is possible. “If there is the term ‘Pole’ today, then we don’t have to imagine a Polish nationalist who shouts ‘Poland for the Poles!’” Fionik says. “We should move toward an understanding that when someone says ‘Pole’, we imagine that this is a person who loves his neighbor, no matter his faith.” A heartening sentiment — even if Podlasie’s little fatherland remains in danger.

To mobilise his base, Tusk has seemingly placed his bets on the reliable call to arms of national security. With Moscow’s escalating its hybrid war against Poland, he has seized on his country’s centuries-deep animosity towards Russia to bolster his own credentials while also raising doubts about PiS’s own loyalties — mirroring very closely the ways that PiS had itself vilified him during last year’s election season.

Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote about PiS’s committee to combat Russian influence, deriding it as an obvious political ploy meant to disparage Tusk as a Russian agent. Surreally, Tusk has now resurrected this committee for a very similar purpose, aiming its barrel at PiS and its political allies ahead of this weekend’s elections. His government has taken other pages from PiS’s national security playbook too — late last month, Poland re-established a border exclusion zone along its border with Russia-aligned Belarus that PiS originally put in place in 2021 and 2022.

The overt reasons for this are not hard to glean. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Belarus has continued, at Russia’s behest, to manufacture a migrant crisis at the border, while Russian agents continue to spread disinformation in Poland by, for instance, hacking into its state press service. According to European intelligence agencies, Russia is embarking on a campaign of increasingly more violent acts of sabotage across the continent, and Poland is likely to be in its crosshairs.

But just like PiS utilised this set of circumstances to go after Tusk, so too is Poland’s new prime minister unduly leveraging the Russian threat for political gain today. Fuelled by intense ideological rifts on everything from abortion rights to rule-of-law issues and the authority of the EU, Poland’s ever-expanding conflict between its two dominant partisan camps has inevitably begun to seep into its military and national security architecture — presenting a cautionary tale of political polarisation’s ability to undermine a country’s ability to respond to a potentially existential adversary.

The Russian influence committee Tusk has put in place, which officially started work on Wednesday, has important differences from PiS’s equivalent. It will, according to Tusk, not be an “investigative” body, and rather than sanctioning individuals outright, it will present potential cases of interest to the state prosecutor’s office.

Yet according to Bartłomiej Kucharski, an analyst at the publication Wojsko i Technika, Tusk’s committee will likely be just as partisan as PiS’s version, as it will possess no ability on its own to conduct truly robust fact-finding investigations or to uncover conclusive evidence of wrongdoing. “Perhaps there are such cases of [Russian] influence [among PiS and other parties],” Kucharski told me. “However, this committee doesn’t have the ability to really substantiate this or to punish anyone for it. In reality, this is an attempt to mutually pelt each other with accusations in order to limit support for the other’s political rival.”

Tusk’s committee was created at least in part as a response to the defection of administrative judge Tomasz Szmydt to Belarus last month, where he requested asylum and claimed he had been persecuted in Poland. Since his flight from Poland, a warrant has been issued for Szmydt’s arrest due to his alleged participation in information operations on behalf of Belarus and Russia.

Szmydt’s actions triggered a wave of finger-pointing by Tusk — in comments last week, he suggested that Szmydt’s connections to Poland’s enemies raised red flags about the man who hired him, PiS-era Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro. Yet the individuals who have garnered the most scrutiny from Tusk’s government lately have been former PiS Minister of Defence Antoni Macierewicz and one of his trusted deputies, Colonel Krzysztof Gaj. When announcing his new committee against Russian influence, Tusk claimed a “noose of information” was tightening around Macierewicz, accusing him of “disarming” the Polish armed forces during his tenure and surrounding himself with people allegedly tied to Moscow, like Col. Gaj, an infamously anti-Ukrainian military leader.

Investigators reportedly conducted a search of Gaj’s home last year, during which they found an extensive archive of military documents. However, no charges have been brought against him, and no investigation has been launched into Macierewicz’s alleged connections to Russia. Misconduct by such leaders is certainly possible — but experts believe Tusk’s increasing proclivity to suggest guilt by association in his campaign against Russian infiltration, often without any solid evidence, has the potential to rattle the rank-and-file of Poland’s military and security services.

More from this author

Europe's fate rests on Georgia

By Michal Kranz

“I imagine that certain officers who were promoted by Macierewicz may feel uneasy,” Marek Świerczyński, head of the security desk at the Polish research institute Polityka Insight, told me. “It would be a risk to the system if some suspicions about Macierewicz were to be automatically applied onto the officers who were appointed by him.”

Such politicisation of Poland’s armed forces would undermine critical components of their cohesion, hampering their ability to function meritocratically at a time when Nato’s security hinges on it. Beyond such practical concerns, though, Tusk’s accusations and the resurrection of his committee present reputational risks for Poland’s security architecture as well. As Kucharski told me: “The very institution of the state becomes less reliable if a committee arises that is really for nothing, that does not have clear goals, doesn’t carry out real work, and could really be replaced by two or three paid publicists who would argue that those on the other side are Russian spies.”

In tandem with political mudslinging, Tusk’s government has utilised every possible opportunity to underscore its credentials as a bulwark against Russian infiltration, even in cases where none exists. After a fire destroyed a shopping centre in Warsaw last month, Tusk claimed the incident was “likely” connected to Russia and arrested several suspects in the case — even though, according to Kucharski, the event was more probably the result of arson related to localised mob-style score-settling. In an interview with the Polish press, a former Polish lieutenant colonel dismissed the Russia connection a conspiracy theory.

Of course, Russian acts of sabotage are indeed taking place in Poland, and pose a serious security threat to the country. But like his committee, Tusk’s politically motivated speculation undermines the real work of Polish counterintelligence services working to uncover Moscow’s influence in the country, cheapening legitimate charges of Kremlin infiltration in the process. Ask supporters of either Tusk’s ruling coalition or PiS, and you’ll find people in both camps who are convinced the other side is working for Russia. This reality is emblematic of Poland’s political divide today, and explains why encouraging such theories plays well with both sides’ core voting blocs. Already, Macierewicz has shot back at Tusk with claims of his own about the prime minister’s cooperation with Moscow.

The truth, however, is that, regardless of the reality of Russian influence in Polish politics, its wholesale politicisation has only served to benefit Moscow, whose core aim in its operations against Europe is to foment doubt, discord and intransigence among its rivals. A polarised Poland where matters of national security are treated as mere tools to garner votes ultimately favours none of Poland’s actors. Generating anti-Russian headlines may help Tusk win a few more seats this weekend — but at what cost?

After initial failure, Putin had two perfectly reasonable options. He could have ordered a retreat — a politically feasible choice since low-level warfare had been underway for years and the entire operation could have been passed off as an exercise in intimidation. Alternatively, he could have declared war, mobilised the Russian Armed forces and invaded Ukraine in earnest.

Instead of choosing between retreat or an all-out offensive, Putin and his unimpressive advisors simply tried one thing after another, from the launch of as many missiles as possible against Kyiv and other cities (even anti-aircraft missiles, with their small warheads) to an attempt to conquer Odesa via the industrial town of Mykolaiv, whose shipyard workers acted out a favourite theme of Soviet propaganda: workers streaming out of factories to fight the enemy with whatever weapons they had.

After that, there was mostly retreat for the Russian forces as they gave up the territories they had won at the start, around Kharkiv and on the northern edge of Kyiv. At this point, Putin’s aim was seemingly to keep the entire south, including the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in addition to Donetsk and Luhansk.

Since Putin had not declared war to mobilise the Russian army (it would have meant calling up 18–year-old conscripts, and having their mothers at the Kremlin gate), he tried everything else, from deploying units manned by contract soldiers recruited in non-Russian peripheries in Siberia and the Caucasus to relying on the Wagner collection of desperadoes and ex-convicts. Finally, he decided to take the political risk of recalling 300,000 reservists.

It is these troops — or rather the actual number who turned up, and were not signed off for health reasons during their refresher training — who now provide the forces that Putin can send into action, in one of two ways.

First, these fresh soldiers might simply be used to continue fighting in the old way, which at this point in the war means to keep trying to drive the last Ukrainian forces out of Donetsk and Luhansk. This aim already looks achievable: the Russians are advancing in the village of Bilohorivka, the very last part of the Luhansk region that is still in Ukrainian hands, and they are also advancing against the city of Bakhmut in the very last part of Donetsk still held by Ukrainian forces. It is possible, then, or at least “not impossible”, that Putin is now trying to extract a slice of victory from a disastrous war, by offering to give up remaining Russian-controlled parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange for Ukraine’s surrender of Donetsk and Luhansk, the two regions which had the largest proportion of Russian speakers to begin with, where popular resistance to Ukrainian rule was strong.

Suggested reading

The madness behind the battle for Bakhmut

By David Patrikarakos

Of course, Zelenskyy would also have to agree to negotiate, and aside from his expressed refusal to give up any territory at all including Crimea, it is not clear that he would have the authority to negotiate over territorial concessions. But that is when the reality of Ukraine’s limited sovereignty would emerge to settle the matter. The country now depends on the United States and its closest allies to survive, and the US in turn would have to go along with Europe’s major governments, who would undoubtedly demand an end to the war.

Moreover, the transfer could even acquire democratic legitimacy with properly supervised plebiscites in the two contested regions. A referendum can be anything or nothing, as in the farce staged by the Russians in Crimea on March 16, 2014. But a plebiscite is very precisely defined by the 1919 rules set at Versailles: it must involve not a handful but thousands of neutral inspectors to examine IDs and issue ballots, and territorial control by armed units sent by neutral countries. Those rules were applied in the plebiscites held to apportion disputed territories between Germany and Belgium, Germany and Denmark, Germany and Poland, and between Austria and Hungary. In every case, both sides accepted the result and violence stopped. Under the same rules, plebiscites could now be held in Donetsk and Luhansk with ballots assigned to anyone who can prove pre-2014 residence, even if they later left, as many refugees did before and after the new war.

But Putin also has a second path before him. He could leave the regional Donetsk and Luhansk troops, contract-soldier units and Wagner mercenaries to drive back the Ukrainians step by step, and he could use the fresh units of reservists — with their refurbished eight-wheel troop carriers, self-propelled artillery and main battle tanks — to change the terms of the war altogether, by launching a new invasion from Belarus.

Instead of more grinding frontal fights, Russian columns could advance straight down from Belarus into east-central Ukraine, towards Korosten and Zhytomyr to reach Vinnytsia, a part of the country that has seen no fighting, and where there are very few Ukrainian troops, and no obstacles in the flat terrain. In doing so, the Russians would cut off all the highways and railway lines that bring weapons, ammunition, and civilian supplies from Warsaw, Berlin, Prague and the West beyond them to Kyiv, Odesa and the entire south and east of the country, except for rare air freight.

Suggested reading

We are already at war with Russia

By Thomas Fazi

If the Russian army can pull it off, that in itself would be an operational success that would restore some of its lost reputation, as well as Putin’s, which would not necessarily be a bad thing if it allows him to negotiate an end to the fighting. Yes, “negotiate”, because cutting off the roads and railways from the West would not actually open the way for a military victory. Russian columns could certainly do a right turn to drive into Kyiv, but once there they would be destroyed in a very accelerated second Stalingrad: Kyiv and its surroundings are now full of determined fighters amply equipped with anti-tank and other weapons, and columns of eight-wheel troops carriers are desperately vulnerable in urban areas.

But an operational-level victory that leaves the Russians astride Ukraine’s critical supply lines could open the way for the diplomatic solution. Yes, there is only one: the exchange of internationally-supervised plebiscites in Donetsk and Luhansk for Russian withdrawals from all other parts of the south and south-east, and of course an end to all fighting. From the first day, this was the only exit from the burning house of war, and so it still remains.

It is unnecessary to debate whether this situation derives from hypocrisy or bad diplomacy. It is both, and at the heart of it, lies the fundamental conundrum facing EU geopolitics: how to defend Europe’s liberal-democratic ideology in a hard world where it is too weak to enforce its will, and the continent’s nearest neighbours are emboldened towards swift, decisive action by their total rejection of Europe’s moral norms. What the self-proclaimed moral superpower lacks is a basic understanding of power: where it lies, and how to use it. But worse, Europe’s leaders lack the fundamental willingness to act strongly and decisively in defence of European interests.

In his 1951 masterwork The Forest Passage, the writer and philosopher Ernst Jünger observed of pre-war German society’s meek subjection to the Nazi regime he despised that “long periods of peace and quiet favour certain optical illusions. Among them is the assumption that the invulnerability of the home is founded upon the constitution and safeguarded by it. In reality, it rests upon the father of the family who, accompanied by his sons, appears with the axe on the threshold of his dwelling.” A naive and self-regarding faith in the smooth functioning of liberal institutions serves only to render you powerless when faced with a challenger who does not respect the rules of your game: ultimately, freedom and security depend on your willingness to wield power yourself, and to actively defend your liberty and way of life.

Nearly seven months into Putin’s war in Ukraine, we see this is the essential challenge facing Europe today. The US security umbrella has rendered Europe weak and powerless, believing that it could sway the rest of the world towards its governing philosophy through offering trade deals as carrots, relying on America’s offstage presence to wield the stick. Yet the continent now finds itself a geopolitical pygmy, bullied by autocrats like Putin, Erdogan and Lukashenko, structurally at the mercy of more assertive actors. This winter we shall endure the results: just as Covid finally revealed our continent’s structural dependency on Chinese manufacturing, so has Putin’s invasion of Ukraine revealed our dependence on Russian energy to sustain not just our industrial capacity but the very building blocks of modern, middle-class life.

Commentators who once lauded figures such as Merkel have suddenly perceived, too late, that there is nothing very liberal or admirable about subjecting your people to the whims of illiberal tyrants. Yet Merkel’s sudden fall from grace shows us only half of the equation: the nature of European institutions, built around myths of ever-expanding liberal progress, remains the same. History has moved on, but Europe’s governance has remained infantilised, stuck in a vanished past. Even after Merkel, Europe remains ruled by Merkelians and institutions expressly designed to stymie the swift and decisive action a world of crisis and competition demands.

More from this author

The mythic power of King Charles III

By Aris Roussinos

In his 2019 book The Strongmen, the German political theorist Hans Kribbe distils his rare policy experience of having worked for both the European Commission and Putin’s government to claim that to survive an anarchic world, Europe will have to adopt many of the manners of the archetypal strongman. It was no more a call for an actual European strongman than Hobbe’s Leviathan was a demand for rule by monstrous giants: Kribbe uses the term more as a metaphor for comfort with executive power than as a political roadmap.

The strongman, as he notes, citing de Gaulle as an example, differs from the dictator or the classic totalitarians of the 20th century in that his transcendence of the ordinary rules is always limited in time. Born of crisis, the strongman’s brief but decisive display of executive power aims to unblock a congested system — a great reset if you will — allowing the ordinary functions of the state to return, reinvigorated, once the crisis of the day has been surpassed. Unlike the fascists or communists of the past, he is not ideological: ”the strongman lives in an embattled, chaotic and post-ideological present, not an idealised future”. The language of consensus and persuasion can only work so far in an illiberal world: “Europe should be fluent in its liberal values, but it should also be strong. It must become aware that it is but one community in a pluralistic world that is potentially hostile, and that may destroy it.”

Kribbe likens 21st-century Europe to 19th-century China, which even as European powers seized its territory and imposed humiliating terms on the Middle Kingdom, retreated to a smug and self-defeating certainty in the superiority of its values and political system. “Only after suffering humiliation after humiliation did China conclude that its cultural sophistication would not protect its freedom,” Kribbe notes, adding that: “Today, if Europe clings to the notion that the world just wishes to emulate its model, be taught by it, it risks making the same mistake. It will tell strongmen like Putin and Erdogan to behave or go home, and they will only laugh and go about their business as before.” Indeed, Kribbe observes darkly: “if Europe’s position is that the truthfulness of its liberal values suffices to secure its sovereignty, it may need its own century of humiliation to discover that only the strong can be free.” As a vision of a better world, Europe’s idealism and commitment to persuasion and consensus may be admirable, but it is no roadmap to navigating an anarchic world of competing states.

There are echoes of Kribbe’s analysis in Macron’s landmark speech to the conference of French ambassadors earlier this month, in which he observed that for things to stay the same for Europe, everything must change. “The economic order, open, liberal capitalism… has gone out of order,” he said. “The reality is that the pandemic has fractured production lines. It has re-regionalised, sometimes re-nationalised, certain production chains. And I think it has permanently de-globalised a large part of world production.”

More from this author

Ernst Jünger: our prophet of anarchy

By Aris Roussinos

Similarly, in the political sphere, Macron observed, “we are living in the beginning of an illiberal moment”. Indeed, “geopolitics is gradually being structured around a competition between the United States and China”, in which China “can legitimately challenge” the American-led order and “redefine the rules of the international game”. The result, for Macron, is that “we will also have to rearm ourselves morally”. Like Jünger, Macron understands that true liberty ultimately depends on strength and the capacity for self-defence. As he declared: “We must be a strong nation which, as I said, knows what the price of freedom is.”

What would a sovereign Europe, able to defend its customs and way of life against autocratic challengers look like? For Macron as for Kribbe, to avoid its looming fate as a helpless vassal of one great power or another, Europe must reclaim the language of power — and finally accept the reality that it is a sovereign polity among others, with its own interests to defend. Yet as Kribbe notes, for the ruling generation of EU politicians, the language and worldview of sovereign power is seen as somehow immoral, a fundamentally indecent relic of a less enlightened age. But delegating our security to America is no more moral or stable in the long run than delegating our industrial capacity to China, or our energy security to Russia: it leaves us at the mercy of non-European actors, whose interests are not identical to ours, and whose actions will always subordinate our security and prosperity to their own. As Kribbe warns, “Those who farm out their protection to the strong, also farm out their freedom. They can never eliminate the possibility of extortion.”

Adopting a Schmittian frame, Kribbe observes that it is only in the state of exception that sovereign power reveals itself. Yet, he warns, “given that they are designed as a bureaucratic and technocratic escape pod from the world of geopolitics and power, the EU’s institutions are not fitted out to project strength”. Citing Europe’s difficult and so far subordinate relationship with the strongmen of Eurasia as the necessary harbinger of a new age of European sovereignty, Kribbe terms the continent’s current predicament as “the age of encounter” — the encounter being with sovereign power itself, raw and vital. But we can take the Schmittian framing further: we still live in an age of exception, a period of ever-spreading, accumulating crisis, in which only those actors capable of bold and decisive action will survive. As Kribbe warns, Europe must decide just one great dilemma: “choosing strength. Is it a vassal or sovereign? … In a world dominated by power, no question is more important.”

Suggested reading

Europe has lost the energy war

By Thomas Fazi

What the assumption of sovereignty would look like is hard to determine: it need not, and probably ought not, as Kribbe emphasises, mean the consolidation of supreme power in one person, but is better interpreted as an understanding of what sovereignty means, and a willingness to use it. In any case, Kribbe’s portrayal of the former EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker as the continent’s chosen interlocutor with autocratic rivals appears misguided. Meanwhile, the longest-serving European leader, Viktor Orbán, though well-versed in the language of power, shows himself in practice more an accomplice to Europe’s autocratic rivals than their challenger. Perhaps Macron himself, one of the few theorists of statecraft and no stranger to a certain Gaullist temperament, would seem a better avatar — though the perennially hostile Central European response to his attempted geopolitical balancing act mitigates against his chances.

Arguably Poland’s decisive policy choices in Ukraine, and its rapid programme of rearmament is itself just such a form of swift, decisive action, which may soon make Poland the sovereign land power on the European continent — indeed, without the vital rearmament aspect, a similar case could be made for the UK. Yet what is certain is this: we live in an anarchic world of hard power, and the European Union’s current structure and idealistic worldview leaves the continent weak and almost powerless. Far from the nascent superpower it hovers indecisively on the edge of becoming, Europe, similarly wedged between rival empires, is as helpless at determining its own fate as tiny, luckless Armenia. The coming winter, and the years that will follow, will be harder than they needed to be. We must ensure at the end of this period of trial that we Europeans are never left this vulnerable again: Europe cannot survive another Merkel, nor prolong the vanished order of willed powerlessness she presided over.

Well, with the gift of hindsight, the collapse of a vast, ideologically-driven nuclear superpower into social, economic and moral anarchy might have concentrated more western minds than it did. “Nyebyezopasnost” is the word Russians (and Ukrainians, Georgians, Kazakhs, etc…) often use to describe their Nineties, usually translated as “insecurity” — though “never-without-danger” is closer to its actual sense. For the ordinary Russians whose voices were collected by the Belarussian writer, Svetlana Alexievich in Second-hand Time (2015), her remarkable oral history of the Soviet collapse, it was a period of chaos, anger and despair. Through her polyphony of voices, Alexievich sounds the void that is left when both security and meaning are removed from a society overnight.

This is pretty much what happened in the Russia of the Boris Yeltsin era, as “Capitalist Shock Therapy” was imposed under the Washington Consensus, criminals flourished, savings evaporated with hyper-inflations, as many as seven million people died what would later be termed “Deaths of Despair“, and the Economics Minister, Yegor Gaidar, appeared on Russian TV, trying to teach a dazed nation how to sell mineral water. Nothing that counted before counted anymore. “For twenty, thirty years, people were on the waiting list for an apartment,” complains Marina, a 63-year-old Belarusian woman, interviewed by Alexievich. “Then, one day, Gaidar comes and laughs in our faces: Go ahead and buy one! With what money?…We spent our whole lives believing that one day, we would all live well. It was a lie! A great big lie!”

Notwithstanding the evils in the Soviet experiment and the cynicism and dysfunction that characterised its Eighties iteration, it is just never a good idea to leave such a void untended. You don’t know what will come to fill it, though in retrospect, Putin’s construction of a “military Disneyland” for children; his Orthodox-Death Star Cathedral of the Armed Forces; his “Eternal Regiment” marching at the annual Victory Parade day parade — all this should really have rung a few alarm bells. In her introduction, Alexievich gives plenty of warning. “Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great idea,” she writes:

“This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else — hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarised. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn’t recognise their own slavery — they even liked being slaves.”

Alexievich, born in Ukraine in 1948, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 for her “documentary novels”, which occupy a contested zone between journalism and artistic endeavour. Her 1985 book The Unwomanly Face of War, which related the Great Patriotic War (as Russians label World War Two) through the voices of women, sold over two million copies in the USSR. She has also written about the Soviet-Afghan war, Chernobyl, and the epidemic of suicide in the former USSR — and, inevitably, incurred the displeasure of the Alexander Lukashenko regime in Belarus, though she remains in Minsk, where she has spoken out against the war. “Those people who were brought up by their Soviet parents, taught by Soviet teachers on Soviet textbooks, are now Soviet people…The romanticism of slavery is still living in the people who do not have anything, who are victims themselves, talk about the pain they are in, but still are confident that ‘we used to be great’. That is what lives in them.” It will take a long time “to squeeze the Soviet slave” from the national character.

More from this author

Hillbilly Elegy resents 'white trash'

By Richard Godwin

Alexievich would know: she is, self-confessedly, a sovok. This is a disparaging term both for the USSR itself (it literally means “dustpan”) and for the individuals shaped by it. Alexievich is interested in how history plays out within this “miniature expense” of the human individual. “It’s where everything really happens,” she writes. Of course, it’s where it happens for presidents and his siloviki too — and Putin (born 1952) would also be a sovok. In fact, you can almost imagine the Nineties Putin among the anonymous chorus of voices in Second-hand Time, complaining that he now has to drive a taxi, his secret service income isn’t enough to live by, muttering darkly about the great betrayal.

Alexievich’s subjects range across the former USSR and across the decades. There are dissidents and true believers, exiles, émigrés, victims of sectarian violence in Azerbaijan, Abkhazia and Tajikistan, and ordinary consumers, too, sincerely delighted at finally being able to get hold of western appliances, as colourful as possible, as everything used to be so grey. (“There’s loads of everything. You want to spoil yourself, indulge. It’s therapeutic. We’re all so sick”.)

But almost everyone is bewildered. “The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb,” says one interviewee. The idea of being poor didn’t really exist in the USSR; the common man had status, however theoretical it might have been. An unrepentant communist laments the fact that in the Soviet era, the streets had names like Metallurgists Avenue and Proletariat Street. Now, everything is being renamed Noble Street and Merchants Quarter. “Not everyone is capable of stopping at nothing to tear a piece of the pie out of somebody else’s mouth,” she says. She sincerely believed she was striving for freedom.

And yet, those who opposed communism were also at a loss — especially the intelligentsia who gathered in kitchens to discuss banned literature and tell jokes about the party. One describes the pleasure of “external migration of the mind” that was possible under communism. He managed to secure a demotion from engineer to janitor, which meant 30 less roubles a month but who cares? There was nothing to buy anyway and more time to read. One of the first things that happened, post-1991 was that the second hand shops began to fill with books — now utterly useless.

Suggested reading

The Russia we have lost

By Ben Judah

But curiously, it is those who had suffered the cruellest excesses of Soviet ideology who appear the most anguished. The Nineties was the decade of realising that any sacrifices made in the name of the Motherland had been meaningless. If there is anything worse than spending years performing hard labour in Siberia, using your fist for a pillow, feeling your teeth come loose with scurvy, it is discovering that you did all that for nothing. “I spent my life building a great nation. That’s what they told us,” laments Marina the Belarussian, recalling her years working on the Abakan-Taishet railway (singing komsomolsongs all the while). “I don’t want any German biscuits or sweets. Where are my just desserts? The fruits of my labour?” Her neighbour, Sashenka, has recently covered his head in acetate and set himself on fire on the plot that he had defended from the Nazis decades earlier.

Amid the crime, disorder, murder, terrorism, despair, suicide, pornography and paranoia there is a sense, above all, of promise unfulfilled. “What did we want?” says one who had cheered on Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. “Gentle socialism, humane socialism.” And what did we get?…Bloodthirsty capitalism.” Time and again, people complain that they weren’t consulted. History was something that was done to them. What they wanted was equality and freedom. Not this.

As a westerner, it is hard to read all this without squirming. Was no one aware what would happen? Where the hell was everyone looking?

Suggested reading

Sanctioning Russia could topple the West

By Thomas Fazi

There are omissions in Alexievich’s narrative. She has, it becomes clear, her own version of events. I suspect much of this is, in fact, crafted for western ears (there are surprisingly few criticisms of the West) and I can’t help wonder about the voices she omitted or embroidered. More concerning: some of the accounts in Second-hand Time have appeared in earlier books, with certain details migrating from one story to another. However, the same accusations could be levelled at Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago — which is no less forceful for being a bit unscrupulously sourced.

My deeper criticism is that it tends to reinforce the idea of Russia as some great live, literary epic — a stage for tragic, meaningful suffering. This is an idea that is at once sentimental and incredibly dangerous. (All those deaths have to mean something.) But then again, one of Alexievich’s repeated themes, actually, is how you can’t really trust books. “We lived in a world of mirages,” says the anguished dissident whose reading has proved useless. “The Russia of our books and kitchens never existed. It was all in our heads.”

Did our leaders really expect that a functioning civil society could grow out of these ruins? Was Russia left to its fate through naïveté — or cruelty? Was it “just desserts” for what Ronald Regan termed the “evil empire”? But think: after the Second World War, the Allies pumped money into West Germany, and held its hand as it came to terms with its past. No American president went to Russia and declared: “I am a Muscovite!” There was no Nuremberg for those who upheld Stalin’s many Terrors. Only a vast avant-garde neoliberal experiment, which produced accelerated versions of all the rampant inequalities, deaths of despair, and information wars that would soon consume the West.

Ultimately, Second-hand Time leaves an impression of two monsters co-habiting the Kremlin. There was the grey monolith of communism itself — a drab, totalising creature that smothered lives and yet which did, in some important respects, impart meaning and free people from other tyrannies. But there was also the dark monster of Russian autocracy, resident since the days of Ivan the Terrible. Inscrutable. Cruel. Unpredictable. Even as it changes form. “Our country has a Tsarist mentality,” says a former secret-service agent in one of the most telling interviews. “Everyone needs a Tsar. The Czechs can have their Vaclav Havel…we need a Tsar. The Tsar, the Father of the Russian people! Whether it’s a general secretary or a president it has to be a Tsar!”

The mistake was assuming that killing the first monster would smother the former. They killed the wrong monster. Whatever Russia emerges from this nightmare, we can’t make that mistake again.

Since Russian tanks and men swarmed across the border on 24 February, we’ve been wrenched back in time. What is happening on the battlefields of Ukraine is something we haven’t seen for over half a century anywhere the Western media really cares about. This is not the tit-for-tat killings between psychotic paramilitaries that was Yugoslavia. It’s not the cave battle of Tora Bora, and it’s most certainly not the counterinsurgency of Iraq. It is two armies facing off in the field; lines of tanks chewing up the sodden earth; phalanxes of soldiers marching step by step; bawling air raid sirens and, of course, bombed out cities mottled with dead kids.

That is to say, it’s World War II redux. Over the weekend, I spoke to a friend in Ukraine who I would accompany to the battlefields of eastern Ukraine when all this kicked off almost eight years ago. She had just got back from Kyiv. “It was hell,” she said. “The east was child’s play compared to this.” Another friend tells me about a local man who has just returned from the front. “They’re animals,” he says of the Russians, adding that he plans to return after a brief rest because he doesn’t want the Russians “to do to his family what he saw they did there”. When I ask what this means, her response is blunt: “Executing people. He said they catch pro-Ukrainian people in Kherson and shoot them. One by one.”

Almost two weeks ago, I wrote that “of all the conflicts I have engaged with or covered in my life, Ukraine is where I most clearly see the unambiguous resurgence of violent, expansionist fascism. Ukrainians are fighting for us all, remember that.” If it was a touch grandiose, it was also, I think, accurate. I believe that what is being hammered out right now on the battlefields of Ukraine is not just its future and Russia’s, but the West’s, too. If the Ukrainians had folded after 72 hours or however long Putin’s lick-spittles told him the “special police operation” would take, then the Spetsnaz and gangs of Kadyrovite scumbags would be halfway to Georgia and Moldova by now. Half the east would now be gone and a new Iron Curtain, though perhaps this time a gold one embossed with the Versace logo, would be descending from Tbilisi to Minsk.

Suggested reading

Why the Left is split over Ukraine

By Dorian Lynskey

As it happens the Ukrainians — pumped full of Western javelins and stingers — fought like hell. And we finally started sanctioning Putin’s bag men. Poor Roman Abramovich has had Chelsea confiscated. A sad day indeed, but we all have to make sacrifices.

Now, after a month, politicians on each side talk peace. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said everything will be up for discussion. He had first agreed to talks with Russia at the end of February but not to the location the Russians wanted: Minsk. You can see why, what with Belarus being one of the launch points for the Kremlin’s invasion and now de facto Russian territory. Indeed, why bother with Minsk, why not just meet in the Kremlin? Or perhaps even cut out the middleman and just hold the talks in a Gulag?

It was an unserious suggestion three days into a war the Kremlin thought would be a cakewalk. As things have gone badly for the Russians since, there have been further rounds of talks. The outlines are already clear: Zelenskyy has hinted he is ready to make compromises over the future of the Crimea and Donbas territories that Russia stole in 2014. I know this bothers some — though an increasingly diminishing number — Ukrainians I know. But it’s sensible. They’ve been gone a long time. A five-year-old in 2014 is now a teenager; and he or she hasn’t grown up in Ukraine. Plus, Ukraine is probably better off without the Donbas. Trust me: I’ve been there.

Also on the table is Ukrainian neutrality, which essentially means a commitment not to join Nato. This is also sensible because Nato membership was never realistic anyway. If it were, Kyiv wouldn’t be in the war it’s in now. All this, Zelenskyy has stressed, would have to be put to the Ukrainian people in a referendum.

Suggested reading

Sanctioning Russia could topple the West

By Thomas Fazi

In essence it’s about accepting the reality on the ground. Crimea and the Donbas are gone; Russia will never countenance Ukraine in Nato. As far as what Russia has to accept, the same principle applies. This means acknowledging that Ukrainians are a sovereign people — not, as Putin seems to think, merely confused Russians. If he still doubts this, he can find the evidence for its veracity in the thousands of body bags now crossing the borders back into Russia. This would mean withdrawing his troops from all Ukrainian territory barring Crimea and the Donbas. He must also accept that Ukraine now has a formalised relationship with the West, based around military equipment and cash. This would hopefully be easier for him to comprehend. After all, he created it.

Do this and there is a way out. What bothers me is that Moscow doesn’t want one. Wherever I look I see talk of Russian overreach, of Russian losses and Ukrainian successes. And it’s not just from online blowhards. I speak to the military experts. Everyone from British officers to this amazing chap on Twitter who works out the progress of the Russian offensive from the state of its army’s wheels is clear. The war is going badly for Moscow.

People now talk of a stalemate. And this worries me because, once again, we need to understand that this is not a 21st-century but a 20th century-conflict. What was World War I if not years of stalemate punctuated by periods of intense, incontinent violence? Stalemates can last a long time and claim the lives of millions.

I think Moscow knows this. Generally, it uses peace talks as an excuse to rearm, regroup and better its chances of more effectively murdering its enemies. I think it’s negotiating in bad faith once again. It can afford to have its conscripts chewed up in Ukraine. It’s not like their families can complain. Putin has turned Mariupol into Aleppo. Now he’s deporting thousands to Russia. From Syria to Siberia, from Assad to Stalin.

Suggested reading

Vladimir Putin's war on chaos

By Terry Eagleton

Russia’s assault on Ukraine attacks us all. First, it assaults language. It perverts the meaning of human rights and basic decency. “Humanitarian corridors” become “killing fields” and “peace” means only yet more death. And then of course they come for all you have left: your senses. “We have not invaded Ukraine.” “Ukrainians are shelling themselves.” What you saw you did not see.

This is Putin’s Russia, and it is dragging us back to the darkest period in modern history. More war, not peace, will always be his aim.

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.

Suggested reading

What the West gets wrong about Putin

By Harald Malmgren

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.

Suggested reading

Putin has history on his side

By Dominic Sandbrook

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.

Suggested reading

Why Biden has sacrificed Ukraine

By David Patrakarakos

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

But it’s not just the cold that is constant in Ukraine’s east: Russian soldiers have been there for almost eight years — and now the Kremlin looks ready for yet another fight. This latest buildup started early last year when, after a few years of relative quiet, it sent around 110,000 soldiers to the border — the largest military build-up there since 2014. And then: nothing. Until now.

In recent weeks, the Russian forces have been bolstered by naval infantry, heavy weapons, logistical units, and parachute battalions. Startled reservists are arriving on the border, as are units from Russia’s east, having trundled thousands of miles across the country by train to line up and face down their Ukrainian neighbours. Independent Belarusian journalists are reporting that Russian hardware is arriving in Belarus for “snap military drills”, supposedly to be held in February. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Washington has accused Russia looking for an excuse to invade: White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed that US intelligence had “information that indicates Russia’s already prepositioned a group of operatives to conduct a false-flag operation”.

The background to all of this is diplomacy — of sorts. On Sunday evening, US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov met in Geneva in the first of several planned meetings to try to resolve the crisis. The two positions are clear. Washington wants Russia to de-escalate by pulling back its troops and agreeing to respect Ukrainian territorial integrity and sovereignty; Russia insists that the US and Nato accede to its demand not to expands eastwards, and that Ukraine will never become a member.

Suggested reading

What the West gets wrong about Putin

By Harald Malgren

The question is: why all this now? Russian fears of Nato encirclement are as old at the organisation itself. According to Vladislav Davidzon, Ukrainian-American author of the original and superb From Odessa with Love, the reason is simple. “High oil prices mean Russia is flush with cash,” he tells me. “After having had a very good 2021, the Kremlin sees this as a decisive moment. They see a weak American president in the White House who has continually talked tough but constantly signalled that he wants a quiet reset of policy.”

He continues: “As soon as Biden took office, the Kremlin started testing him with the initial buildup early last year. Everything since then has confirmed their belief. The Russians think they will never have a better opportunity to reorder things in their favour.”

But still the US tough talk continues. Earlier this month, the Biden administration threatened “decisive” action against Russia if it crossed the border, outlining a series of “punishing” financial, technology and military sanctions against Moscow that it said would go into effect within hours of an invasion of Ukraine.

It’s a depressing moment when, as a political analyst, you realise that one of the most dominant trends in international politics is déjà vu. Almost eight years ago I sat in Kyev’s government offices while politicians chain-smoked their way through military briefings and repeatedly wondered when the much-promised support from the West would come. I squatted in the snow with soldiers who asked me why the West could not just give them a few lousy javelin anti-tank guided missile systems to stop so many of their comrades being blown to bits. Eventually the javelins came, but only after years of painful diplomacy, international pressure and former president Barack Obama had left office. By the time Trump finally gave the green light, hundreds of Ukrainians had died.

What made all of this worse was that — at each stage of the crisis — the Ukrainians had been led to believe that help was coming; that the US or Germany or Britain would finally do what it had long threatened and impose sanctions on Russia that would a make it stop, or provide the type of military help to turn things around.

Suggested reading

The West must stay out of Ukraine

By Marshall Auerback

Now we are here again: the same questions and the same requests, though the Ukrainians understand the game now. I recently spoke to a Ukrainian national security expert and she told me something that stuck in my mind: “For years the Brits gave us so much support — verbally. But it was only after the Skripal poisoning that we really felt the difference. The Russians poisoning a British agent in their own country got the British mad. After that it became personal for you guys.”

She was right. In the end, talk is talk but the national interest — and its attendant, pride — reigns alone. As Davidzon points out, for all of Biden’s strong rhetoric, he continues to resist the idea of making sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline project part of congressional law.

In this, the US is backing its most important EU partner: Germany, which wants to decouple the pipeline from any EU or Nato-wide sanctions package. Europe sucks on Russian gas like a crackhead on his pipe. And how many junkies can realistically sanction their dealer? Germany is weak here; and the US is made to look weak by proxy.

Now add domestic politics into the mix. The Kremlin has gone too far to back down now. If you govern by fear and control, you can never, ever afford to look weak. Ukraine, meanwhile, has its own problems. Yesterday morning former president Petro Poroshenko landed in Kyev to face charges of “state treason” for having “supported the activity of terrorist organisations”. Simply put: his administration is alleged to have assisted the Russian-backed and commanded separatists in selling coal in the country’s east even as Ukrainian troops were being killed.

So the situation is combustible. Neither side can afford to lose face with their own people. Once more war is likely to come and, when all is said and done, it is largely because of our own weakness.

Why did Putin just walk into Crimea in 2014 and take it? Because he knew the West would talk but not act. Why did Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko feel able to order a Ryanair plane down and take a dissident off it last year? Because he knew the West would talk but not act. Why is Moscow, now via Minsk, continuing to weaponise migrants against the EU? Well, you get the point. Moscow suffers no real consequences for its behaviour, so why should it stop?

Suggested reading

The closing of the Russian mind

By John Lloyd

All the while, the West talks endlessly without really doing much. And that only makes things worse: for Ukrainians, for democratic Belarusians and, above all, for our own credibility. The biggest winner is always the Kremlin.

It’s time to put up or shut up. Either we back Kyiv — by giving it full military support and smashing Russia with sanctions, or we have the guts to tell the Ukrainians that we are abandoning the non-Nato east to Russia and start to draw real red lines that we will actually enforce. It’s time to back Ukraine — or, once and for all, just tell these people, who have suffered so much to defend our interests, that they are on their own for good.

When British Remainers claim to “believe in Europe” — most of them literally don’t know what they’re talking about. As one travels eastward from the pointy western end of the continent, Europe just keeps widening out. It contains entire nations and peoples that most of us haven’t even heard of. How about Kalmykia — Europe’s only Buddhist state? Or the ginger-headed Udmurts? Or the Alans of South Ossetia? 

Faraway countries of which we know little? Evidently. But Europe beyond the borders of the EU is still out there — and it is currently reminding us of its existence.  

Most urgently, there is the crisis on the border between Poland and Belarus. The Belarusian government has discovered that migration from the Middle East and elsewhere can be used as a weapon against the EU. Migrants are being flown to Belarus, bused to the Polish border and then pushed across the frontier. The Polish authorities are pushing back, trapping thousands of people in the no-man’s-land between the two states. As temperatures drop, we’re coming closer to a full-blown humanitarian crisis — and perhaps to armed conflict. A regime capable of using people as weapons is also capable of giving weapons to people. 

Meanwhile, a thousand kilometres to the south another crisis is brewing. The Dayton Agreement that brought peace to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995 is breaking down. This fragile state is divided into two main parts — Republika Srpska (predominantly populated by ethnic Serbs) and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in which ethnic Bosniaks and Croats are the biggest groups. 

It was never the most robust of arrangements, but now the Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad Dodik, is making moves towards independence for Republika Srpska. Most ominously, he wants to divvy up the Bosnian armed forces. What could possibly go wrong?

Unlike in the Nineties, this is happening right on the EU’s border. Bosnia is roughly triangular in shape and is surrounded on two of its three sides by Croatia, which is now an EU member. If the Bosnian state collapses, then that could bring the EU into conflict with Serbia and Russia — both of which support the Bosnian Serbs. And if that wasn’t enough, Turkey could be dragged in too — as the patron of the predominantly Muslim Bosniaks. 

Turkey is itself a potential source of instability for Europe. President Erdogan has long been a thorn in the EU’s side, but at least he was willing to do a deal on curbing the flow of illegal migrants from the Middle East (in return for money). However, he’s reported to be in poor health — and his party’s grip on power is slipping. Polls show that the opposition is in with a chance of winning the next general election. Whether they’ll be allowed to win is anyone’s guess. But one way or another, disruption is coming — and that could mean an end to the immigration deal. 

Could the European Union cope with multiple crises on its borders? No, because it just doesn’t have the capacity. You only have to look at Ursula von der Leyen’s statement on the Belarus border crisis. She condemns the actions of the Belarusian authorities — describing them as a “hybrid attack”; but she only offers unspecified “support” to the Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian governments. Significantly, there’s no mention of the only EU agency capable of acting in this matter — which is Frontex — the European Border and Coast Guard Agency. Even though Frontex is headquartered in Warsaw, the Polish government has declined the agency’s help. Clearly, the Poles have little confidence in the EU’s approach to border control.

In Bosnia, it’s the US keeping a lid on the situation. The EU has been of scant use — it couldn’t even stop the circulation of a diplomatic note that proposed a three-way partition of Bosnia (between Serbia, Croatia and a rump state for the Bosniaks). The Americans have rejected this dangerous idea, but what happens if they lose patience with policing Europe and tell the Europeans to sort themselves out? 

As for Turkey, any agreement with the EU depends on the ongoing cooperation of the Turks — or, when that’s not enough, turning a blind-eye to the alleged strong-arm tactics of the Greek and Bulgarian authorities.

What all of these crises reveal is the essential powerlessness of the European Union. We’ve been told ad nauseam that the EU is the producer of peace in Europe. The truth, however, is that the EU is the product of it. 

A political entity that lacks an army, a police force or the legitimacy conferred by national sovereignty, cannot survive without an international order created by others. If this order is compromised — even to a limited extent — then things start falling apart. Just look at the refugee crisis of 2014 and 2015, which contributed to Brexit, the election of a populist government in Italy and the tightening grip of the Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán.

What would a deeper, longer crisis do to the EU? A number of possibilities present themselves, none of them good. The least worst option is that America, through NATO, rides to the rescue; in which case the western pecking order is settled for years to come. Alternatively, Brussels does a deal with Moscow — and essentially pays Danegeld to the Russians from hereon out. 

Or maybe the EU could start manning-up — either by creating an actual European Army or expanding Frontex into a de facto military. However, that creates a problem of democratic accountability. Von der Leyen as Commander-in-Chief? I hardly think so. A more likely scenario is more of what we’re seeing already — which is the EU relying on its eastern member states to hold the line. That means allowing them (indeed, paying them) to do things their way — which won’t be pretty. As Aris Roussinos argues, expect to see more barbed wire, more walls, more tear gas and worse.

We should certainly expect Belarus — with Russia in the background — to keep up the pressure. If the line breaks, then illegal migrants will pour into Europe fuelling a renewed populist backlash. Don’t forget there’s a Presidential election in France next year and that candidates of the far Right are in second and third place. 

Of course, the line may hold. But what would be the price of that? I’m reminded of the fate of the Roman Empire. Long before the western half of the empire fell and Rome was sacked, the institutions that had defined the state were reduced to hollow shells. That’s because all the real power had leaked away to the legions on the troubled frontier. 

The decisions that actually mattered weren’t made in the Senate or anywhere else in Rome, but in the forts and watch towers along the Danube and the Rhine. In the Crisis of the Third Century, marked by multiple invasions and rebellions, the Roman establishment was usurped by a series of “barracks emperors” — leaders of men who owed their position to soldiery not aristocracy. 

Obviously, the EU is not the Roman Empire — but it is an empire of sorts. And like all empires it has to choose a frontier and defend it. 

The stability of the EU currently depends on the sort of politician who can agree a budget proposal in a committee meeting or strike a backroom deal over dinner in a Brussels restaurant. It’s a dull, bureaucratic and sometimes corrupt culture of government. If, however, the EU comes to depend on the sort of person who can repel a column of cold and hungry migrants, then we’ll look back on the present era with fondness.

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.

Suggested reading

How Europe's Last Dictator survived

By Daniel Kalder

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.

Suggested reading

Can Europe learn from communism?

By Roger Scruton

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.”

Suggested reading

The war that saved Europe from Communism

By Roger moorhouse

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.”

Suggested reading

Is Putin loosening his grip on Russia's regions?

By Mary dejevsky

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.

More from this author

This is no 'cultural revolution'

By Daniel Kalder

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.

More from this author

Nineties Russia prepared me for coronageddon

By Daniel Kalder

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.”

Suggested reading

Is Putin loosening his grip on Russia's regions?

By Mary Dejevsky

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.

“Just one,” says a woman in a loosely tied headscarf. “They only let one family in”.

Like others, she immediately starts to queue to buy another ticket. Like others, she will take the same train back to the Polish border at 8.18am tomorrow, hoping this time she and her family will be the lucky ones.

The scene in Brest, a city of around 300,000 people situated on the Eastern border of the European Union, has been repeating for almost two years. The only thing that changes is the number of people who board the train. Less than a year ago there were 400-500 of them every morning – at its peak, as many as 3,000 refugees were waiting in Brest to cross the Polish border by train, the vast majority of them Chechens, with some Tajiks, Uzbeks and Armenians as well.

Among them, according to organisations such as Amnesty International and the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, are victims of torture, persecution and other forms of violence. A humanitarian crisis is looming over this quiet border city that itself has a complex history of changing national affiliations.

Today the numbers of people trying to cross are much lower. Around 200-300 asylum seekers now wait in Brest, explains Maksim Kavaleu, a lawyer from the Belarusian human rights organisation Human Constanta, and each day 60-80 take the train to the Polish border town of Terespol. But the numbers constantly change. Kavaleu tells me that the record for the most attempts made by a refugee to cross the border is 65.

Among those trying to cross is Madina, tall and erect in her long dark dress, and with a steely look of determination.[1. The names of the protagonists have been changed.] With her two sons, aged 11 and 12, she travelled to Brest by taxi from her small village in Chechnya (there is no border control between the Russian Federation and Belarus).

Madina has been in Brest for only a week but she has already tried to cross the border five times. Every time she tried to explain to the border guards that she wanted to request asylum she heard the same question: “Are you going to Europe to work?”

You only have two minutes to explain your situation, she complains over a cup of tea in the hostel room next to the train station that she is renting for US$7 a night. There is no privacy; everybody around can hear what you are saying. But the worst thing, she says, is that they do not want to listen. “They interrupted me many times and they kept asking: ‘Do you have family in Europe?’”

If “they” – the Polish border guards – were willing to listen, she would tell them her story. It is a story about her husband who was killed a few years ago, his body dumped at a petrol station. He had problems with the military, she tells, her eyes empty. Madina escaped to France, but returned to Chechnya after a few months, where the police, Madina says vaguely, kept harassing her and her family.  She did not feel safe. Besides, her late husband’s family, in accordance with Chechen custom, wanted to take custody of her sons. “I want to give my children a future; I want them grow up in a safe place,” she says.

Madina has some savings, but the money is quickly running out and she is worried. Each journey to and from Terespol costs $10 per person. Staying in Belarus is not an option. Human Rights Watch described the country’s asylum system as “dysfunctional”. The Chechens do not feel safe here, and there have been reports of undercover Chechen security force agents intimidating asylum-seekers in Brest. KGB, the Belarusian secret service, closely cooperates with Kadyrovtsy, the security service of the Putin-backed Chechen president, Ramzan Kadyrov.

Madina casts a glance at her sons, who are watching a cartoon on a mobile phone. “Do you know a lawyer, anyone who could help us?” she asks, looking at me expectantly.

___

The migration flow into the Eastern border the European Union is not a new phenomenon. Since the 1990s, around 80,000 asylum seekers from the former USSR have crossed the border. The majority are Chechens, who fled their country after the first and then second Chechen wars with Russia.

Larisa Suleymanova, a philologist and translator, came to Poland via this route from the Chechen capital Grozny in 2004. “There was nothing … no integration courses, no psychological counselling, almost no NGOs dealing with migrants,” she recalls when we meet in Warsaw, where she has been living for the last few years working as a mentor and translator for other Russian-speaking refugees. “The whole assistance system was under construction. But people received us warmly’ there were no problems.”

Even in a homogenous country such as Poland, where in 2013 immigrants amounted to less than 1% of the population (a statistic that has started to change with the influx of Ukrainian migrants over the last few years), the 8,000 Chechen refugees who came to Poland were not a big group. Nor were they very visible –many of the refugee centres were located in non-urban areas, far from big cities.

Besides, Poland was a transit country for most: at least 75% of asylum-seekers who entered Poland continued their journey further west, to Germany, Austria or France.

That may help to explain why Poland had some of the highest levels of openness towards refugees in Europe – pollsters CBOS in May 2015 found that 72% of people thought that Poland should take in refugees. That would soon change.

___

In September 2017 a young Chechen woman was beaten in Warsaw after dropping her children off at kindergarten. The attacker was a Polish father whose children went to the same preschool. This was not an isolated case. Between 2014 and 2016 the total number of proceedings concerning hate crimes in Poland tripled.

Joanna Subko, from the office of the Polish Ombudsman, said the nature of hate crimes has also worsened. “While before the dominating form of hate crime was hate speech, now the proportions have changed and there are more cases of physical violence,” she said. “Their most common targets are Muslims now, though their minuscule number in Poland has not changed.” According to the State’s Prosecutor’s Office, in 2015 there were 64 reported cases of hate crimes against Muslims; in 2017 the number was 328.

Politics has contributed to this change of attitude. In autumn 2015, while thousands of asylum-seekers were crossing the ‘Balkan route’ and Europe started to talk about a “migration crisis”, Poland was in the middle of an election campaign. And while the Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans coming to Europe rarely reached Poland, they soon became one of the election’s main topics.

Further reading

Is Sweden about to have its Trump moment?

By Tino Sanandaji

The refugees bring “all sorts of parasites and protozoa”, declared Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which went on to win with an absolute majority. Kaczyński and other right-wing politicians also linked refugees to terrorist attacks in Europe, repeating that they would not expose Poland to such danger by accepting refugees from Muslim countries.

Despite the fact that the only well-known Muslims in Poland are a small community of Tatars who have lived there since the 14^th century, and that the vast majority of the population has never had any contact with Muslims, these campaign statements had a deep impact.

Poles started to be afraid. A new CBOS poll in May 2016 found that 63% of respondents were against accepting refugees from the Middle East and Africa. According to various opinion polls, Poles are now more afraid of terrorist attacks and refugees than losing their job or being victim of a crime.

The new, more hostile, political climate inevitably affected the situation at the border. In August 2016, when a few hundred desperate asylum-seekers organised a strike in Brest, appealing to the Polish state to recognise them as refugees, the then-Polish Minister of Interior, Mariusz Błaszczak, replied: “We will not succumb to the pressure of those who want to create an immigration crisis.” He added: “There is no war in Chechnya – it is an attempt to create a new route for Muslims who come to Europe.”

A significant number of people trying to cross the border in Terespol could probably be defined as ‘economic migrants’. But a sizeable minority are not. The Warsaw-based International Humanitarian Initiative Foundation, which provides psychological assistance to asylum-seekers and torture survivors, identified 320 people affected by torture in Chechnya and 122 direct victims of it among the migrants in Brest in the second half of 2016.

According to Maria Książak, a psychologist with the foundation, they found evidence that migrants had been struck with electricity, burnt with cigarettes, and beaten with sticks, cables and plastic bottles filled with water. They were illegally arrested, deprived of sleep, food, light and medical help. Many, she says, were threatened with death and forced to watch others being tortured.

Only a very small number of them were granted entry to Poland. Two particular cases ended up in the European Court for Human Rights. In the case of “Hamid K”, a Chechen asylum-seeker who tried to enter Poland 31 times, the court ordered interim measures that explicitly prohibited Polish authorities from returning him to Belarus. The Polish government ignored the order.

___

For the Polish Ministry of Interior, it is simple: the war in Chechnya finished in 2009, so Chechens – who are officially Russian citizens – who come to Europe are economic migrants. But for many, Chechyna isn’t safe.

Iwona Kaliszewska, an anthropologist from Warsaw University who regularly visits Chechnya and neighbouring Dagestan, says Chechnya is essentially a police state. Ruled by Kremlin-backed Kadyrov, it is a place of human rights violations, political persecution, torture and forced disappearances.

“Apart from the classic categories of political opponents and independent journalists, who face problems in the whole Russian Federation, one of the groups exposed to persecutions are homosexual men,” explains Kaliszewska. Last year, the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta revealed the existence of camps in which up to 100 gay men were detained, beaten and electrocuted, with at least three allegedly murdered.

Further reading

Why a historic African peace deal is good news for Europe

By Ian Birrell

Many women are also fleeing to Europe to escape from domestic violence that usually goes unpunished in the region. There are people fleeing honour crimes –not uncommon in the Caucasus region. And unsettled personal feuds – many dating back to the war – are often solved using the state apparatus of violence.

Finally, explains Kaliszewska, there are the Salafis, the followers of a purist movement within Sunni Islam who are considered terrorists by Kadyrov, who supports and promotes only ‘traditional Chechen Islam’ – Islam inspired by practices of the mystical Sufi order, Qadiriya. Salafis[1. Salafism, like Wahhabism, is a fundamentalist form of Islam that in some parts of the world is antagonistic to those considered to be enemies of Islam. In 2013, the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism.] are often the ones whose arrests, or even extrajudicial killings, boost the statistics of the ‘war on terror’ – for which the Chechnyan government receives funding from Kremlin.

___

The fate of some of those who are returned to the Russian Federation should also sound alarm bells. In February 2015, three months after being deported from Sweden to Chechnya, 23-year-old Kana Afanasyev was killed in Grozny. His corpse bore the marks of electric shocks. In July 2015, 30-year-old Zaurbek Zhamaldaev, recently deported from Poland, was believed to have been kidnapped in Moscow, and has not been heard from since. The total number of such cases is difficult to estimate because the families are often too afraid to speak up.

Ms Książak told me she recently got a WhatsApp message informing her of the death a man she met in Brest who had been trying to cross the border. His wife says he was beaten to death. She too is afraid to make it public. On 8 June, former Chechen policeman Artur Aydamirov disappeared in Brest, after trying to apply for asylum at the border nine times. He fled Chechnya with his family when he learnt he was required to perform military service in Syria. According to Amnesty International, witnesses in Brest saw uniformed men force Aydamirov into a van and drive away. He has not been seen since.

Suggested reading

How the populists have united Italy

By Beatrice Faleri

At the end of 2017, the Provincial Administrative Court in Warsaw quashed several of the Border Guard decisions to deny entry to Chechen migrants seeking international protection. The attorneys representing the migrants believe that, slowly, they are opening a new legal path.

But for now, nothing changes for the desperate people in Brest. On a Sunday morning, the 8.18 am train to Terespol is full of people. Among them is Madina, hoping it will be sixth time lucky.

A few days later, then-Polish Minister of Interior, now Defence Minister, Mariusz Błaszczak said on television: “It is thanks to the fact that Poland does not accept refugees that we are a safe country. We will not repeat the errors of Europe.” No matter the human cost.

The Ministry of Interior was working on a decree that will see asylum seekers, including children, placed in container camps, though this particular idea seems to have been put on hold for now. Unsuccessful asylum applicants may be deported without the chance to appeal.

The day I leave Brest, I get a text message from Madina in the early evening. “I didn’t make it. Do you know a Polish man I could marry? I need to cross the border as soon as possible. Help me.”

This story was written as part of ‘Reporting Migration and Trafficking in the Western Balkans’, a journalism workshop run by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.