At the 2nd World Congress of Belarussians, a poster is shared of a man standing with his feet in a pool of crimson. His face bears resemblance to President Alexander Lukashenko, widely considered responsible for the brutal and uncompromising suppression of mass protests after the presidential elections in August 2020. “Sometimes there is no time for laws,” he has said, justifying the blood on his hands. But the real crime has been committed by those who have called for sanctions upon Belarus, a disproportionate use of force upon a population with little protection from its authoritarian ruler.
This spring, the EU blacklisted 78 individuals and 7 corporate entities thought to be close to the Belarusian government. The US, and soon after, the UK joined the raft of sanctions, targeting specific persons who are key investors in the country’s critical financial, energy, and transport sectors. However, with Lukashenko’s regime growing stronger by the day, this event has raised doubt about the efficacy of sanctions that condemn innocents as geopolitical pawns, rather than target the most powerful players.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the popular leader of the Belarussian opposition, would seemingly be the appropriate candidate to share this message with the West. In exile after fleeing from Minsk, Tikhanovskaya has met with 31 presidents and prime ministers, including President Biden this summer as part of her outreach campaign “to make sure that the voices of innocent people behind bars in Belarus are not forgotten, that they have not been abandoned.”
Tikhanovskaya’s recent meeting with Biden, part of her strategy to incite a broad Western crackdown against Lukashenko, has instead cemented the fact that the Belarussian public are pawns in a geopolitical game between the US and Russia. She hopes that continued Western sanctions will force this ‘ex-president’ to begin negotiations with the Belarusian people, but instead all it will accomplish is strengthen the relationship between Minsk and Moscow at the detriment to liberal values and any chance for democracy.
Maxim Samorukov, the deputy editor of Carnegie.ru, says that “the Kremlin has always perceived the Belarusian opposition as pro-Western… As for Russia, it does not want free competition with the West for Belarus, so they are trying to establish such ties with that country that would make free competition impossible.” Consequentially, “the Belarusian opposition will be excluded from any transit of power option in Belarus, which will occur under Moscow’s supervision.”
Her pro-sanctions agenda has sought to postpone a nearly 1 billion USD planned disbursement by the International Monetary Fund to Belarus, directed to support the energy and power markets to restrict markets and cost investors dearly. But by further alienating the country from Western institutions, the real price will be paid by the Belarussian public, who will lose this game. It also sets a negative precedent for diasporic populations to dictate the needs and wants of their repressed homelands.
“When you are abroad in a safe situation, then all your calls to action will be very skeptically accepted in Belarus,” says Pavel Slunkin, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former Belarusian diplomat. Indeed, her calls for more sanctions on her countrymen, without suffering from the consequences herself, has raised questions of her legitimacy.
High-profile photo-ops cannot replace a working relationship with the actual decision-making authorities in Minsk. While Belarusian opposition strategists have been successful in raising awareness for their cause, they have been noticeably less effective in discerning and mediating the side effects of their achievements nor of reaping any material policy benefits from them.
Tikhanovskaya may be trying to fight a proxy war from afar against Lukashenko with sanctions, but she is directly undermining the ecosystem of investment, enterprise, and market dealings that Belarus will need to rebuild its domestic economy in the future. By ascribing sanctions based on guilt by association, both the Belarussian resistance and Western diplomats run the risk of doing exactly that.
Furthermore, the health of the civil society has deteriorated under sanctions. The democratic resistance underground at best with those who have stood up to the regime are jailed. Tens of thousands have fled because of brain drain from a deteriorating economy. The Belarusian public sphere has been bludgeoned by self-censorship, with the domestic intelligence service, still known by its Soviet name, the KGB, an omnipresent threat. Rates of drug-resistant tuberculosis, historically put at bay with help from Médecins Sans Frontières, are skyrocketing without Western public health investment. Tikhanovskaya says sanctions will allow for the Belarusian people to revolt against injustice, but for all intents and purposes, sanctions have defeated the country’s public.
“Belarusians just want to be happy, but nobody can be happy living under this regime,” she concludes. “It’s impossible.”
What may in the end prove impossible is seeing a free Belarussian civil society under the brutal sanction regimes of the EU and US, subjecting the country to the prison sentence of a future aligned with Russia and their economy gutted.
