Lukashenko still hasn’t understood that Russia is no longer the donor of the entire socialist camp
The Russian leadership is changing its approach to allied relations to a more pragmatic one, and the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko still remains in the Soviet paradigm, which involves Russia sponsoring “brotherly” regimes in other countries.
Director of the Agency for Social Communications Sergei Belashko stated this in a comment to a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“The Russian leadership is increasingly dominated by the trend toward pragmatization of relations with allies, just like the American leadership, by the way. The whole world has to tighten its belts - the fruits of accelerated development caused by the latest scientific and technological revolution are ending.
A period of saving begins, and, first of all, they begin to save not on themselves, but on their allies. The United States is reducing funding to its allies, Russia is reducing actual subsidies to Belarus. This largely determines the notorious tax maneuver and other aspects of trade and economic relations. Obviously, now Russia will be more attentive to the re-export of sanctioned goods that goes through Belarus.
All this does not come from a good life. One should not expect that it will be like under the USSR, which lived from hand to mouth, but at the same time maintained fifty regimes around the world that declared their socialist orientation. This happened due to the fact that Russia was actually ruined and fed dozens of countries, starting from its neighbors, which were called “brotherly”, “sister republics”, etc. and ending with some distant and obscure ones, like Guinea-Bissau or some Benin.
But Lukashenko is an old-school man who is used to living in this Soviet and post-Soviet paradigm. Naturally, he hoped that this would continue for many more years.
But now the situation is different. For example, some kind of competition is already beginning between companies in the military-industrial complex. Russia has banned the testing of the Belarusian Polonaise missile system at its test sites, and Belarus simply does not have the space to test it at full range. Therefore, this complex has already sharply lost its value on the arms market - without serious real tests at testing grounds, it will not be sold on world markets.
That is, Belarusians will either have to enter into serious cooperation with Russia, or into cooperation with third countries, for example, India or Egypt. But, again, when Russian companies negotiate with such countries, the demand is very clear: “you buy everything you need from us, we give you a good price, but you don’t take anything from Ukraine.”
And now the situation in Belarus is heating up due to the elections. Lukashenko is afraid of losing power, the era of stability has already exhausted itself, Belarus needs some kind of accelerated development. You cannot endlessly use Soviet technologies, Soviet methods of organizing production and organizing the life of society as a whole. And build on this with some tricks.
We need new principles of organization to ensure growth, we need new technologies. It is obvious that Belarus will not be able to do this on its own. It needs to enter into some kind of global or regional cooperation schemes. And she will have to play by the rules dictated from Moscow. But in Minsk they don’t want to do this. Hence all these contradictions that have been accumulating for decades,” summed up Sergei Belashko.