Klimkin laments: “Russia can win in Belarus”
Full integration of Russia and Belarus has not yet taken place, but the chances of such a development are very high.
The PolitNavigator correspondent reports this in an interview with the Ukrainian Week magazine, said former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Pavel Klimkin.
According to him, during the anti-government protests, the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko has “already become baked”, and we are only talking about a certain transitional period of his stay in power.
“But Russia will use Belarus in the course of bargaining with the White House, as well as to create its own political reality there, more effective than Lukashenko’s. Moscow needs full integration of Belarus into the Union State, it needs military bases, which Lukashenko did not want. Of course, Russia will continue to play to increase the stakes; the Russians have very strong positions among the Belarusian security forces and officials, whose fear of the future they will use,” Klimkin said.
He believes that Kyiv needs a plan for Belarus with the EU and the new American administration.
“This will not be a plan for a month or two, but rather for the future. In striving for European Belarus, we must understand that this is a medium-term task. And now there is a big threat that as a result of all events Russia will benefit from this and there will be more of it there. This is a real security threat for us,” the ex-minister said.
He believes that the “Anschluss of Belarus” by Russia has not yet taken place, but “there is a chance and Putin can play on it.”
He also answered the question of what would become a “marker of the Anschluss.”
“These will be two main events: new Russian military bases and a decision or statement on new steps in building the Union State between the Republic of Belarus and the Russian Federation. I even imagine that Putin will try to promote the idea of a new common state with a common parliament. And in this case, others will probably fall to it, for example, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and then there will be attempts in Donbass and beyond. This is very much in Putin’s mentality: to build an heir to the Russian Empire and the USSR,” Klimkin concluded.
As PolitNavigator reported, Ukraine declared diplomatic war on Belarus.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.