Three years ago today, the regime of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko appeared to be on the brink of collapse. On August 9, 2020, following an electoral ritual in which the Soviet-nostalgic president-for-life claimed to have received 80.1% of the popular vote, peaceful protesters demanding a free and fair ballot count took to the streets as part of a nationwide movement that would not be repressed for months to come.
"Many of the protesters were pro-Russian, even pro-Putin," Aliaksei Frantzkevich, head of the Ukraine-based charitable fund Free Belarus told Newsweek. "But they were united by the fact that they were against Lukashenko."
Ultimately, support from Moscow proved sufficient to put down the pro-democratic demonstrations, but not before they had discredited Lukashenko's "managed democratic" system—both in the eyes of the world, and in the understanding of Belarusians themselves. However, the fact that Lukashenko's system was exposed as the brutal, manipulative, kleptocratic police state it always had been did not mean that people power triumphed. Instead, thanks in large part to the help of the Soviet-nostalgic dictator next door, things have only gotten worse.
With Russia's help, Belarusian authorities spent the fall of 2000 systematically dismantling the protest movement. In May 2021, Lukashenko's air force scrambled fighter jets in order to compel a RyanAir flight carrying an exiled dissident to make an emergency landing while transiting Belarusian airspace en route from Athens to Vilnius. The fall of 2021 saw Belarus manufacture a migrant crisis on Europe's borders by importing Iraqis and Afghans, then busing them to the frontier. In the winter of 2022, Belarusian territory was used as the staging ground for Russia's full-scale assault on Kyiv. Today Belarus again finds itself in the news, this time for offering its territory as a safe haven for Wagner Group mercenaries following rogue caterer Yevgeny Prigozhin's abortive march on Moscow back in June.
But while Lukashenko's fantastical rants have literally become the stuff of parody, the dictators in both Minsk and Moscow still have the most to laugh about. In August 2020, Belarusians woke up to the absurdity of their political reality, and their prize was an ever more absurdist ruling regime. If Vladimir Putin was ever worried that his own people might care to wake up to the absurdities of their increasingly totalitarian political reality, his Belarusian partner-in-crime appears to have done quite a competent job of demonstrating to them what happens to Russian-speaking people who take to the streets demanding free and fair elections.
