Paul Taylor, a contributing editor at POLITICO, writes the Europe At Large column.
PARIS — The sight of hundreds of thousands of Belarusian citizens demonstrating peacefully for an end to dictatorship and election-rigging is a welcome and hopeful one for democrats across Europe and throughout the West.
Yet the mass movement in Minsk also raises the risk of a re-run of events triggered by previous pro-democracy upheavals in Ukraine and Georgia. Both uprisings were followed by Russian military intervention and the creation of “frozen conflicts” through which Moscow exerts pressure on the former Soviet republics that dwell uneasily in the “gray zone” between Russia and the West.
Belarus is closely tied to Russia economically and militarily, and so the stakes are high for President Vladimir Putin as he weighs how far to support Belarus’ embattled ruler Alexander Lukashenko and whether to try to engineer a controlled transition of power or let events take their course.
In the West, the calculus is also complex: How can Europeans and Americans help the people of Belarus achieve their democratic objective without providing a pretext for Russian intervention?
So why not simply acknowledge this reality and take the false prospect of Euro-Atlantic integration off the table, if not forever then for the foreseeable future?
There are some obvious things they can, and should, do. They can refuse to recognize Lukashenko’s flawed reelection. They can provide moral and political support for Belarusian civil society, trade unions and independent media. They can impose targeted sanctions — as the European Union is preparing to do — on individuals deemed responsible for election rigging, repression and torture, although these are largely symbolic.
They can also support the involvement of the politically neutral, pan-European Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which has expertise in supervising elections. They can urge Putin to work through the institution for an orderly resolution and assure him that there is no Western plan to grab Belarus. And they can promise economic assistance to a genuinely democratic Minsk government.
But there is also a wider geopolitical struggle overshadowing the events in Minsk in which Europe has to strike the right balance.
For the past 20 years, a struggle for ascendancy between Russia and the West throughout Eastern Europe has doomed the people of Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan and Armenia to a diet of instability, poverty and misrule.
If the West wants to avoid Belarus disappearing into the abyss of the “gray zone,” it will have to play its cards right and rethink how it engages with Russia in this region.
The Kremlin is determined to prevent countries it considers to be in its “sphere of influence” from joining NATO, or for that matter the European Union. The United States and its European allies reject this notion as a relic of a bygone age — even as they jealously guard their own de facto “backyards” in Latin America or West Africa — and argue that all European nations must be free to choose their own future, including their alliances. Some activists in Washington and Central Europe have gone further and campaigned relentlessly for those countries to be shoe-horned into the U.S.-led military alliance as fast as possible to spite Russia.
This flawed approach to the region has done more harm than good.
If Moscow was unable to stop NATO’s eastward enlargement in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet empire, Putin drew a red line against further expansion in 2008, when the U.S. unwisely pushed a NATO summit in Bucharest into declaring that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO,” without setting any date or pathway to accession. Eager to avoid provoking the Russians, France and Germany thwarted the adoption of a Membership Action Plan for the two countries.
This misguided NATO decision set the backdrop for Russia’s military intervention in Georgia in 2008 after Georgian forces attacked Kremlin-backed rebels in South Ossetia. Washington ignored pleas to come to Georgia’s assistance, and Moscow eventually accepted a French-brokered cease-fire that re-froze the conflict without resolving it.
Since then, NATO has regularly declared that its door remains open and periodically admitted new members in the western Balkans. But in practice, it has deferred any prospect of accession for Ukraine and Georgia indefinitely.
The reality is that none of those countries are remotely ready to join either the EU or NATO. What’s more, public opinion in the “gray zone” is as deeply divided over the idea as it is in the West, and a significant number of Western European governments would not want them to join.
Opposition supporters in Minsk, Belarus protest against disputed presidential elections results | Sergei Gapon/AFP via Getty Images
So why not simply acknowledge this reality and take the false prospect of Euro-Atlantic integration off the table, if not forever then for the foreseeable future?
Doing so would remove any rational basis for Russian fears of encirclement. In return, Moscow would have to commit to end its military support for rebels from Donbas to Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia and cooperate with OSCE mediation to terminate frozen conflicts in the region.
Rather than joining NATO, perhaps a better model for countries in the region is that of Finland, which was neutral during the Cold War and respected its Soviet neighbor’s foreign policy interests but remained a fully functioning independent democracy and market economy. Or the more recent example of Armenia, which was able to stage a democratic revolution in 2018 while preserving a Russian base on its soil.
It’s hard to imagine a formal agreement along such lines, not least because NATO could hardly unsay now what it rashly declared in 2008 without losing face. Nor would Washington or Brussels want to be seen to cut a deal on the fate of the “gray zone” behind the backs of the peoples concerned. Governments in Central Europe and the Baltic states would noisily denounce any closing of NATO or EU doors as a betrayal of their freedom-seeking neighbors.
A protest in Minsk | Sergei Gapon/AFP via Getty Images
But the next U.S. president, after consultation with the leaders of Germany, France and the U.K., might give Putin a private assurance that he would not pursue NATO enlargement in the “gray zone” and would prolong existing arms control agreements, provided Russia put an end to the various “frozen conflicts” in Eastern Europe, called off provocative buzzing of neighbors’ air and sea space, and complied with nuclear missile limits.
Whether Putin would see such a détente as being in his interest is far from clear. He could declare victory in having brought an end to NATO’s eastward enlargement. But for reasons of prestige it’s hard to imagine him reversing the annexation of Crimea, even though it has come at a high cost in the form of heavy sanctions on the Russian economy and subsidies on the ground — and for little strategic benefit, since the Russian Black Sea navy was based in Sevastopol anyway.
At the very least, a more realistic and less ideological Western policy on the “gray zone” might change the calculus in Moscow by offering carrots as well as sticks. And it might make Putin more inclined to let the people of Belarus have their democratic way.