Amid the chaos of Russia’s brief uprising, an unlikely figure emerged to take credit for calming the spiraling situation. Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus and often called «Europe’s last dictator,» has been ruling one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world since the mid 1990s.
This weekend, as Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries marched on Moscow and President Vladimir Putin rushed to defend the city, Lukashenko sought to cast himself as Russia’s peacemaker and savior.
To hear him say, he was responsible for dissuading Putin from his threats to kill Prigozhin, and instead persuaded the Russian president to allow the leader Wagner and his fighters to leave Russia for Belarus, according to reports in the country’s state media.
In this modern Russian drama, the role of rational mediator and counterweight to the Kremlin was striking. Lukashenko is widely seen in the West as a puppet of Putin from a Russian satellite state, particularly since 2020 when the Russian president helped him stay in power through weeks of anti-rule demonstrations and the violent crackdown that followed.
“Without Russia, Lukashenko will not survive a single day,” Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Lukashenko’s main rival in the internationally condemned presidential election that year, told NBC News on Thursday.
Lukashenko’s part of the Putin-Prigozhin deal was about «self-preservation,» he said. “Let’s be clear, Lukashenko was saving himself, not Putin. He realizes that if Putin’s regime starts to crumble, his own regime will fall first.»
Tsikhanouskaya was forced to flee with her children to neighboring Lithuania after Lukashenko claimed a landslide victory in the 2020 vote and crushed protesters who, backed by international election observers, said the ballot was rigged. Her husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, a political blogger, was jailed for 18 years in December 2021 for organizing a riot, after a trial condemned as a sham.
In response to the events of the weekend in Russia, Tsikhanouskaya believes that Lukashenko’s role in the Putin-Prigozhin truce has been inflated. «He was just a messenger for Putin in this situation, not a go-between,» he said. He added that the presence of Wagner fighters on Belarusian soil threatens not only its people, but also the European Union countries bordering it: “It escalates Russia’s internal conflict onto our territory, turns Belarusians into hostages of Russia and creates a threat to Belarusian sovereignty. and our neighbors.”
Lukashenko’s moment of attention came amid a dispute between Prigozhin and the Russian Defense Ministry. Wagner has led the fight for several key Ukrainian cities, including Bakhmut, an eastern city that became a key symbolic prize for Putin when he claimed to have taken it last month at the cost of thousands of men.
But its leader has been highly critical of the country’s military commanders, using his well-oiled social media machine to launch repeated tirades against Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff, whom he accused of subtracting importance to Wagner’s role and not supplying his fighters with enough ammunition
It came to a head this weekend, resulting in a showdown between Prigozhin and the Kremlin that many experts say was the biggest challenge of Putin’s 23 years in power. Just as the crisis threatened to escalate into an internal Russian conflict, Prigozhin announced that he was turning around, thanks, according to Lukashenko, to a deal he brokered.
Belarus watchers in the West are now debating how much to believe this version of events and what this means for their former Soviet republic.
“Putin was very, very humiliated,” said Rosemary Thomas, Britain’s ambassador to Belarus from 2009 to 2012. “It’s very humiliating to have to give in to Prigozhin; It’s super humiliating to have to depend on Aleksandr Lukashenko, on all people.»
It is «quite well known» that Putin and Lukashenko «hate each other», Thomas added. But the deal «has given Lukashenko a bit of moral lift, at least for the moment.»
With Putin and Prigozhin seemingly weakened, Russia’s only ally «who benefits from this situation is Lukashenko,» said Maryna Rakhlei, a Belarusian citizen and former journalist, who is a senior official at the US German Marshall Fund, a group of nonpartisan experts. tank. “He has the symbolic capital of being able to present himself as an independent actor and a regional peacemaker,” she said.
But that doesn’t answer the question of «why Lukashenko?» added Rakhlei, who is now based in Berlin, adding that it is unclear why it took an outsider to bring about a truce between the warring factions of the Russian state.
Belarus is likely to remain a pariah in the eyes of the West, accused by human rights groups of silencing political opposition with rigged trials, unfair punishment and torture. Lukashenko has clung to power after a series of elections seen as rigged, so much so that the United States and the European Union no longer recognize him as the country’s legitimate leader.
Despite a wealth of documentary evidence and witness testimony, Lukashenko denies accusations of human rights abuses and being a puppet of Putin. In October, he told NBC News that he «occasionally fell out» with his Russian counterpart, but they remained «very close friends and reliable partners» who had «absolute trust in each other.»
NBC News has contacted Lukashenko’s office for comment on his role in the Putin-Prigozhin deal, as well as Belarus’ human rights record and relationship with the Kremlin.
In recent years, Belarus has moved ever closer to Russia’s orbit and, in June, allowed the Kremlin’s tactical nuclear weapons to be deployed on its territory.
It is now unclear what the future holds for Lukashenko, or indeed Putin and Prigozhin.
The Belarusian leader is «basically a laughing stock in much of the West, but he’s been able to play this role and I think he’ll do it for all he’s worth,» Thomas said, noting that the danger to the three men is not over.
Lukashenko, he said, is still «going to have this nervousness and anxiety about what would happen if Putin were to fall, because he still depends a lot on him.»