By Brian Whitmore
With Alyaksandr Lukashenka, it is often difficult to separate the signal from the noise.
One day he is lamenting that Russia’s war in Ukraine “has dragged on” for too long, is not going according to plan, that Belarusians “categorically do not accept any war,” and that “the West can sleep peacefully.” Those remarks, made by Lukashenka in an interview with the Associated Press on May 5, seemed to be a thinly veiled criticism of Moscow and an attempt to distance himself from Vladimir Putin’s flailing war.
But just days later, on May 10, Lukashenka boasted that Russia had agreed to help Minsk produce mobile ballistic missiles similar to the Iskander. At the same time, his military chief Viktor Gulevich announced the deployment of special forces to the Ukrainian border to counter the West’s “build-up of their military presence on the state borders of Belarus.”
For the famously mercurial Lukashenka, of course, the bar for what constitutes erratic behavior and over-the-top contradictory rhetoric has always been exceedingly high. But in recent weeks, he seems to be clearing it with ease.
Lukashenka’s dizzyingly conflicting words and deeds are a function of his preternatural instinct for self-preservation operating in the context of the fog of war. He has repeatedly demonstrated in the past that he is a ruthless and cynical survivor. But in the current wartime environment, he does not appear to know what he needs to do in order to survive.