"Wagner, Wagner, Wagner. People don't understand that we are pragmatic about it," Aleksandr Lukashenko said Tuesday in Minsk. The president of Belarus thus informed his Minister of Defense, Viktor Khrenin, of the failure of the march towards Moscow undertaken by the army of mercenaries of Yevgeny Prigozhin last weekend.
Under the agreement to resolve the crisis, Wagner's fighters (financed from the Russian state budget, according to President Vladimir Putin) can now choose between demobilizing, joining the ranks of the regular army or settling in Belarus. However, the details of the deal have not been disclosed, neither on the conditions of the settlement nor on the number of personnel, nor on the subordination of those who move to the territory of Moscow's main ally.
"If your [Wagner's] commanders come to us and help us ... experience. Look, they are on the front line, the assault squads," Lukashenko continued, addressing Khrenin. "They will tell us what's important now ... They will tell us about weapons: which ones worked well and which ones didn't. And about tactics, and weaponry, and how to attack and how to defend. Priceless. This is what we must learn from the Wagnerians," the Belarusian leader added. "You don't have to be afraid of them. We remain vigilant," he said.
Judging by his political career, for this leader who has been in power since 1994, being "practical" means making the most of situations. His management between the Kremlin and Prigozhin allows him today to present himself as a peacemaker of fratricidal conflicts, although the Russian press assures that Lukashenko was only the figure who finished off the pact already reached by other interlocutors, including the Russian Deputy Minister of Defense, Yunus-Bek Evkurov, and the head of the Security Service, Aleksandr Bortnikov.
At a ceremony with the Belarusian officialdom in Minsk, Lukashenko recounted his speech and, like a wizard of suspense, mentioned points he said he was not authorized to reveal. Namely, what Putin meant when he explained to him on Saturday morning that the situation was difficult, how Prigozhin had told him about his conflict with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and, incidentally, how many Russian nuclear weapons have already been transferred to Belarus.
While Lukashenko narrated his deed, Putin acted as if nothing had happened in Russia and, instead of going to Rostov-on-Don or Voronezh – cities affected by the mutiny – he went to the historic city of Derbent, on the banks of the Caspian, to supervise the plans for local tourism development.
Putin, surrounded by supporters, on Thursday in Derbent (Dagestan). GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/SPUTNIK/KREMLIN (EFE)
According to Lukashenko, apart from the functions of war training, the mercenaries will be able to be quartered "for some time" in Belarus, where they will have to pay their own expenses, will not be used to provoke neighbors, will not guard the installed nuclear weapons and will not carry out recruitment tasks.
This is not the first time the Wagners have gone to Belarus. During the pandemic, mercenaries used this country as a stopover on their trips to destinations in Africa or Syria. In July 2020, Belarusian security services arrested 33 members of that organization on the outskirts of Minsk (apparently in transit) and accused them of being part of a group of 200 fighters who arrived to destabilize the country. Russian leaders were irritated by accusations that appeared to be staged by Lukashenko on the eve of a botched presidential election. The detainees were released and the matter fell into oblivion.
Russian observers who follow Putin closely say the Russian president considers his Belarusian counterpart too tough. Lukashenko seems to feel in his element when he visits harvester factories and farms. But in the past, he came to have ambitions to take charge of the so-called United State of Russia and Belarus. In full decrepitude of President Boris Yeltsin and later, when Putin had not yet taken hold, the Belarusian had a support lobby in the regions of Russia, where he made frequent trips. In addition, every year, from 2003 to 2019, Lukashenko organized a large press conference in Minsk to which he invited Russian journalists from the provinces.
The United State of Russia and Belarus, which harmonizes various elements of the management of both states (but not currency or internal political affairs), was formalized in 1999. The relationship, understood differently in Minsk and Moscow, has oscillated over time, depending in large part on Lukashenko's reluctance to let his country be "swallowed up" by the eastern neighbor and also on Putin's ambitions and the Russian military's conceptions of security.
Belarus took good advantage of its status as a privileged partner of Moscow and of the freedom of movement between the two countries. Following the invasion of Crimea in 2014, the country was an active supplier to Russia of food and consumer goods that had been subject to sanctions and bans.
"A house with two rooms"
"The United State of Russia and Belarus," he once said, "is like a house with two rooms." It is "two states and one homeland," he says today, and Lukashenko's homeland remains an heir country to the Soviet Union. In the conflict with Prigozhin, he wants to be seen as a full-fledged architect. "I am not a mediator," he said, "I am a participant in these events in the same way as President Putin, because this is our homeland." Lukashenko also cited less pompous reasons for feeling involved. "If Russia collapses, we will be left under ruins," he said.
The breakdown at the Chernobyl plant (1986) also affected the perception of atomic energy in Belarus, which, in 1993, became a nuclear-free member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In 1996, with military honors and marches and in the presence of Russian military commanders, the last Soviet nuclear warhead left Belarus for Russia.
As long as he could, Lukashenko resisted Russian attempts to increase his military presence — with new bases, for example — in his country. But after Putin backed him to confront protesters rejecting the opaque presidential election in the summer of 2020, his room for manoeuvre shrank.
In his meeting with military commanders, Lukashenko took the initiative to install tactical nuclear weapons on his territory so that "no one messes here." The Ministry of Defense and the chairman of the KGB [Belarusian security services] have been "ordered to determine the procedure for the use of this weapon." "We must use them in a difficult moment, if they attack us. That is, if they attack Russia or the United States."
"I don't need scrap metal. [Do they bring them to us] for keeping?" The Russians have great warehouses (...), but we have them better, "he said to emphasize after the custody of nuclear weapons are occupied by the Russians and Belarusians.
As a souvenir, according to Lukashenko's official website, Minister Khrenin brought the president the replica of the first nuclear bomb that was developed in 1949 by the USSR. "This one is old. The modern [bomb] looks different," Lukashenko said. After the minister explained that this souvenir was a symbol that this weapon is already in Belarus, the president added: "Let our enemies not think that here we are dedicated to symbolism or that we are very happy with nuclear weapons. It's just symbolic."
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