By: Ekaterina Zolotova
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is on a tour of Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that will last until Feb. 4. His visit to Belarus will be the first of its kind since 1994 – just a few years after the Soviet Union to which all these states once belonged collapsed.
Pompeo will meet with the president and the foreign minister to foster ties with a country that is perpetually susceptible to – and sometimes welcomes – Russian influence. Geostrategically, Belarus is an indispensable buffer between Russia and the West, so maintaining a footprint there is a high priority.
The Kremlin understands that the visit will not change much in the short term; prying Belarus away from Russia will take a long time, thanks in no small part to obstacles to U.S.-Belarus relations such as sanctions, but the Kremlin is wary of any visit that could woo Belarus away from Russia, however long it may take.
For Belarus, the feeling with the U.S. is mutual. Minsk tried to improve relations with Washington throughout 2019. In fact, several senior U.S. officials, including former National Security Adviser John Bolton and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale, visited Belarus.
The countries have been somewhat estranged for years – they even recalled their ambassadors in 2008, something Pompeo is expected to rectify during his trip – and so President Alexander Lukashenko has had to balance (mostly) between Moscow and Brussels, since Russia would feel threatened by signs of life from U.S.-Belarus relations.
It appears as though the U.S. is trying to change that. Washington seems to want better ties with the Eastern European nation and, by extension, more distance between Minsk and Moscow. But there are limits to what each can do. It will take more than high-level diplomatic visits to reset their relationship. If the United States is really ready to normalize its relations and “protect the sovereignty of Belarus,” both countries will have to resolve a host of issues that have kept them apart for years.
One of which involves oil, the vast majority of which Belarus receives from Russia. However, when Minsk and Moscow negotiated fuel supplies at the end of 2019, they failed to reach an agreement, so on Jan. 1 Russia suspended the supply of fuel to Belarus. Instead of making concessions to the Kremlin, Lukashenko began to look for alternatives to Russian supplies.
Belarus is reportedly especially interested in buying Bakken oil from the United States. Just last week, Lukashenko said Minsk was negotiating oil supplies with the United States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and that they promised to supply Belarus with as much raw material as it needed. There are even rumors that the first tanker may arrive in Odessa in February with oil arriving in Belarus through Ukrainian pipelines.
But buying U.S. oil is complicated. Washington levied sanctions against a variety of Belarusian officials and companies as punishment for what it saw as a sham presidential election in 2006.
The U.S. eased the sanctions, including those that hit oil companies, in 2015, after Lukashenko released some political prisoners and invited observers to the presidential election, but didn’t lift them entirely. Then in June 2019, President Donald Trump extended sanctions against a number of Belarusian officials, including Lukashenko, but would just a few months later extend the suspension of sanctions against energy companies for another one and a half years.
That doesn’t mean trade and economic relations will be easy to establish. The presidential election will take place in August, and it seems unlikely that the U.S. will completely lift sanctions before then, since doing so would undermine the point of imposing them in the first place – to show that, by Washington’s account, Belarusian officials pose a threat to the interests and foreign policy of the U.S. and that Belarusian elections are not democratic.
Moreover, upcoming military exercises in Europe, known as Defender Europe 2020, will hinder a U.S.-Belarus reconciliation. During these exercises, the United States will conduct the largest redeployment of troops to the Continent in the past 25 years. Some 40,000 soldiers will take part, nearly three-fourths of which will come from the U.S. Eighteen countries – 17 NATO members plus Georgia – will participate in drills that will span several countries, including those on Russia’s border and those close to Belarus. Lukashenko has repeatedly expressed concern about the drills and has since begun to conduct unexpected and multidimensional readiness checks of the armed forces.
He sees the drills as a threat to his country, and because it’s a threat shared by Russia, it only brings them closer together. (Indeed, despite the turmoil between the two, Belarus and Russia continue to discuss security cooperation. On Jan. 29, Russia’s ambassador attended a meeting of the Security Council of Belarus, during which Belarus reaffirmed its commitment to the strategic partnership, strengthening contacts and developing joint security projects.)
For the U.S. and Belarus to fully cooperate, Minsk will have to make some concessions. For one, Washington wants Lukashenko to invite it to the Normandy talks on the resolution of the Ukraine conflict. For another, it wants Belarus and Poland to settle their territorial disputes. (Poland hasn’t said much about this recently, but Belarus is always vigilant. For these and other reasons, relations between the two run hot and cold.)
Lukashenko will probably agree to none of this. He is using Pompeo’s upcoming visit mostly as a signal to Russia that he is ready to deal with the U.S., something that could give him leverage in future negotiations. In that sense, the meeting is more important to the Kremlin, which someday may have to ask itself if instead of having an allied buffer state it dominates, what if it had a neutral neighbor capable of devising its own foreign policy without taking into account Russian interests?
The latter runs counter to Russia’s plans to integrate the countries that used to comprise the Soviet Union. So far, the Kremlin has yet to comment on Pompeo’s visit, though President Vladimir Putin has unexpectedly invited Lukashenko to meet in Sochi. Clearly, the issue is something Putin can’t ignore.
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