MOSCOW — Viewers of a information present on Belarusian state TV obtained an disagreeable shock not too long ago when a disparaging report about protests sweeping their East European nation obtained the nation’s identify unsuitable. It referred to Belarus as Belorussia, a Soviet-era designation that was dropped almost three many years in the past however remains to be broadly utilized in Russia.
The blunder adopted a flood of Russian journalists into Belarusian state media to fill posts left vacant by locals who’ve stop in droves in solidarity with protesters. The slip highlighted what’s now maybe the largest impediment confronting opponents of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko: They’re now not struggling in opposition to simply their very own president but in addition the Kremlin.
After greater than a month of protests, there may be nonetheless no clear finish sport in sight for both facet, with Mr. Lukashenko and his foes each insisting they will prevail however neither providing a transparent and believable path to victory — aside from continued peaceable defiance by protesters and relentless repression by the federal government.
“He should cease ultimately,” mentioned Ivan Kravtsov, the chief secretary of the opposition’s Coordinating Council, a physique arrange final month however now denuded of its main members by a wave of arrests and expulsions.
Mr. Kravtsov was pressured to flee to Ukraine on Tuesday, leaving the author Svetlana Alexievich, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, as the only real member of the council’s management now nonetheless at giant inside Belarus. Unidentified males tried to enter her residence on Wednesday however she averted detention, in all probability because of a go to by a number of European diplomats.
Mr. Lukashenko, Mr. Kravtsov mentioned in a phone interview from Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, the place he’s now sheltering, can’t presumably expel or jail everybody in Belarus who desires him gone, and so “doesn’t know what to do anymore. Our technique of peaceable protest actually works.”
However the opposition doesn’t appear to know what to do subsequent both, past staging but extra protests and pleading, as Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the principle rival to Mr. Lukashenko in a disputed Aug. 9 election, not too long ago did from exile in Lithuania, for the United Nations to ship screens to Belarus to “doc the state of affairs on the bottom.”
Assured that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia won’t, at the least for the second, let him fall, Mr. Lukashenko has no want to fret concerning the United Nations: Russia is a everlasting member of the Safety Council and might block any transfer which may weaken his grip.
Nor does he have to fret a lot about strain from the West usually. The US and the European Union have each condemned the violence in opposition to protesters however they’ve taken no concrete steps to punish Mr. Lukashenko and his safety officers or to help his opponents.
European leaders agreed in August to set in movement new sanctions that would come with visa bans and belongings freezes on chosen Belarusian officers, however that plan has been stalled by Cyprus, which has entangled the problem in its personal separate quarrels with Turkey.
The US can also be making ready to impose sanctions in opposition to people and enterprise entities in Belarus. A senior American official mentioned on Friday that the measures needs to be prepared in a couple of days, and that they might not be held up by any delays in European sanctions.
Reluctance to take stronger and swifter motion has been fueled partly by fears that help for the protest motion in Belarus would solely play into the arms of Mr. Lukashenko and Mr. Putin, who’ve each forged protesters as instruments of a Western plot to deliver a few “colour revolution.”
One approach to break the stalemate that every one sides, together with Russia, say they might help could be constitutional adjustments to pave the way in which for brand new elections. However Mr. Lukashenko, having declared in August that “till you kill me, there won’t be any extra elections,” has proven no actual curiosity in altering something any time quickly. He refuses to even speak along with his foes, denouncing them as treasonous “rats” and “tricksters” who belong in jail, not on the negotiating desk.
As a substitute, he has centered on rounding up staff who organized strikes and methodically dismantling the opposition, whose most distinguished figures have, one after the other, been pressured to flee overseas or been thrown in jail.
Maria Kolesnikova, the final member nonetheless within the nation of a trio of feminine activists who led an preliminary groundswell of opposition to Mr. Lukashenko, filed a authorized criticism on Thursday describing how, after being kidnapped on Monday in Minsk, the capital, by masked safety officers, she had been warned that she could be pressured to depart Belarus “both alive or in items.”
Having averted expulsion by tearing up her passport on the Ukrainian border, she is now below arrest on subversion expenses.
Protesters have defied expectations by turning out in big numbers every Sunday for the previous 4 weeks regardless of authorities threats, a feat they hope to repeat this weekend. However Mr. Lukashenko, emboldened by Russian help, has solely grown extra insistent that he’s not going wherever.
Talking to state prosecutors in Minsk on Thursday, Mr. Lukashenko mocked these calling for him to depart workplace. “They usually reproach me saying ‘He won’t surrender energy,’” he mentioned. “They’re proper of their reproaches.” Energy, he added, is “not given away.”
Maryna Rakhlei, a Belarusian researcher on the German Marshall Fund in Berlin who helps the protesters, conceded: “It’s a whole impasse. It doesn’t look as if both facet goes to surrender.” However, she warned, “in some unspecified time in the future there will likely be a mistake by both facet” that would flip peaceable protests right into a dangerously violent confrontation.
With Russia on his facet, Mr. Lukashenko appears assured he can win, both by ready out the protesters or, within the occasion of a violent conflagration, crushing them with overwhelming pressure, because the Chinese language Communist Social gathering, the Belarusian chief’s solely vocal overseas supporter aside from Russia, did with protesters in Tiananmen Sq. in 1989.
That his destiny now rests with Russia as a lot or greater than with the individuals of Belarus was made clear this week when, for his first interview since his implausible election victory with 80 % of the vote, Mr. Lukashenko selected to talk to not representatives of his personal nation’s media however to editors from Russian state tv.
Telling the Russians that “solely I can actually defend Belarusians now,” he warned: “If Belarus collapses right now, Russia will likely be subsequent.”
His opponents, who insist they don’t have any need to see Belarus tilt away from Russia and towards the West, as Ukraine did after it toppled its president in 2014, are hoping that Russian help is much extra tentative than Mr. Lukashenko has made out.
“Russia is giving solely verbal help,” mentioned Mr. Kravtsov, and “understands {that a} chief who doesn’t have actual help in his personal nation will not be price something.” Russia, he added, could be “extra snug with a pacesetter who’s supported by his individuals.”
However Russia has to date proven no inclination to dump Mr. Lukashenko in favor of a extra widespread different. Although many analysts imagine that Moscow will ultimately reduce him unfastened, they don’t imagine it will achieve this below strain from the road.
Whereas initially lukewarm in his backing of Mr. Lukashenko, with whom he has lengthy had testy relations, Mr. Putin introduced on the finish of August that he had shaped a “reserve pressure” of Russian safety officers prepared for motion in Belarus “if the state of affairs will get uncontrolled.”
About the very last thing Mr. Putin desires, mentioned Nigel Gould-Davies, Britain’s former ambassador to Belarus and a onetime diplomat in Moscow, is “to see the strongman chief of a neighboring Slavic nation overthrown by peaceable individuals energy” as a result of that will solely set an instance Russians could be tempted to comply with.
“Now it’s Russia and Belarus collectively. There was a visual escalation of Russian help,” Mr. Gould-Davies, a researcher on the Worldwide Institute for Strategic Research, mentioned.
Mr. Lukashenko, based on the Kremlin, will go to Russia on Monday for talks with Mr. Putin on strengthening ties between the 2 nations.
The promise of Russian help has given Mr. Lukashenko respiration area to rethink his technique in opposition to the protesters.
As a substitute of deploying wild police violence, an method used final month that solely infected public anger and inspired extra protests, Mr. Lukashenko is now utilizing relentless however extra focused strain to select aside the protest motion. This has not stopped the protests however it has stripped the motion of its leaders and likewise of its preliminary euphoric hopes that Mr. Lukashenko would fall swiftly.
Russian help, nevertheless, carries severe dangers for Mr. Lukashenko, who has spent years making an attempt to take care of a modicum of independence for Belarus from Moscow and preserve Kremlin-favored Russian oligarchs from gaining management of his nation’s prize financial belongings, which embody one the world’s largest producers of potash fertilizer.
Weakened by the protests, Mr. Lukashenko is more likely to have a tough time resisting, as he has achieved up to now, Kremlin calls for that he open his corporations to Russian traders; conform to host a Russian navy air base; and implement a stillborn 1990s settlement that dedicated Belarus and Russia to type a so-called Union State, an entity that, if ever enforce, would largely merge the 2 nations.
However Mr. Gould-Davies, the previous ambassador in Minsk, believes that Mr. Lukashenko, whereas clearly determined, nonetheless has some leverage left with Russia.
Mr. Lukashenko is aware of that Moscow has no apparent reliable different and doesn’t wish to see him toppled by strain from the road. “That’s an instance that will resonate very badly with the Kremlin,” the previous diplomat mentioned.
Moscow, nevertheless, clearly believes it now has the higher hand. Russia’s official information company, Tass, pressured in a latest evaluation of Belarus that the Kremlin nonetheless needed to type the union state with Belarus. Mr. Lukashenko’s political troubles, it mentioned, would “have a sure impact” on merger negotiations and on “his readiness to compromise on main points.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting from Moscow, and Lara Jakes from Washington.
