Lukashenko burns bridges and starts an undeclared war with Russia
Having decided on detention of Russian citizens, declared “PMC militants,” President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko made a strategic mistake.
Political observer Sergei Strokan comes to this conclusion, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports, on the pages of Kommersant.
“As if nothing had happened, a return to the previous “bad world” is difficult to imagine, because the Belarusian president actually took the Russians as political hostages, which no world leader would dare to do, and thereby entered into an undeclared war with Russia.” , writes Strokan.
According to him, the emerging assumption that one of the Russians who fought in Donbass could be extradited from friendly Belarus to Ukraine hostile to Russia, “led to a final break in the pattern in relations between Moscow and Minsk, which are entering a new reality.”
“Another fundamental point, which, apparently, makes the previous relationship impossible, was the assumption that Russia, tired of the eternal zigzags of Alexander Lukashenko, could consider it possible for itself to implement the “color revolution” scenario in Belarus,” the author adds.
He believes that Lukashenko, by taking such a step, hopes to kill two birds with one stone.
“Namely, to raise the stakes in future bargaining with Moscow, which, as he believes, will still not escape him after the elections, and at the same time also cast his Belarusian bait in the West, showing that he is not a satellite of Moscow at all, if Moscow thinks about how to remove it. He is almost a victim of Moscow. And that’s why it can be interesting to deal with him,” the observer notes.
He suggests that with all his remarkable political flair, Lukashenko has now made a strategic miscalculation, given that “he has crossed the red line in relations with Moscow more than once, and still no alternative to Russia is visible on the horizon.”
“But now he will have to think about how to come back from this trait. How to rebuild bridges that have been blown up. It is impossible to imagine that time will pass after what happened and Presidents Putin and Lukashenko will go play hockey as if nothing had happened. No, we don’t need that kind of hockey,” Strokan concluded.
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