Lukashenka’s ‘Reset’ With West Russian Mirage, Analysts Warn

WASHINGTON, DC – Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenka is once again flirting with the West, hinting at prisoner releases, talking peace with Kyiv, and signaling a readiness to “reset” ties. But many in the West aren’t buying it – not this time.

A sweeping new Atlantic Council report, Minsk in Moscow’s Grip, lays out the case bluntly: Belarus is no longer a sovereign balancing act – it is a Russian-controlled outpost whose leader survives at Vladimir Putin’s discretion.

“This is one of the most pressing questions in the geopolitical space,” warned Brian Whitmore, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “The US is easing sanctions, and this process may be repeated in a very unfortunate way,” he told an Atlantic Council event to launch the report.

The report’s author, Belarusian journalist Hanna Liubakova, stripped away any remaining illusions: “Belarus has been gradually absorbed by Russia, despite all the opposition from the people.”

End of the independence myth

For years, Western policymakers oscillated between sanctioning and cautiously engaging Lukashenka, particularly during the 2015-2020 “limited independence” phase, when he hosted peace talks and posed as a reluctant ally of Moscow.

But that era, Liubakova argues, was always misunderstood. The real turning point wasn’t 2020; it was 2014, when the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas convinced Lukashenka that Belarus “could have been another target.”

His balancing act was never about values – only about extracting more money, energy discounts, and leverage from Moscow.

The illusion of a buffer state collapsed completely after the 2020 protests. Desperate and isolated, Lukashenka turned fully to Moscow, allowing Putin to seize the opportunity.

By November 2021, Belarus and Russia formally endorsed twenty-eight Union State programs, reviving plans to harmonize legal systems, unify markets, and align policies in energy, finance, and taxation, according to the report.

Though presented as cooperation, these integration measures have steadily eroded Belarusian sovereignty – most notably through a unified tax system featuring a supranational committee and a Russian-designed digital platform with centralized access to taxpayer data.

Elites remain firmly loyal; dissenters are jailed or exiled. “There are no factions, no independence. Anyone showing dissent ends up in prison or must leave the country,” Liubakova emphasized.

Kremlin’s goal: capture the regime, not the territory

Agnia Grigas, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, described Belarus as a textbook case of Russia’s “re-imperialization,” but “in a much more compressed and accelerated format” than in Ukraine or Georgia.

When Belarusians flooded the streets in 2020, shaking the dictatorship’s foundations, the Kremlin stepped in decisively, effectively becoming the guarantor of Lukashenka’s survival. No formal annexation was necessary – only a leader with nowhere else to turn.

Since then, integration has accelerated on every front, transforming the country into a de facto Russian military outpost.

Belarus was central to the 2022 assault on Kyiv, opening its skies and military infrastructure, according to the analyst.

Between February 2022 and March 2023, more than seven hundred missiles were launched from Belarusian territory into Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Belarus’s defense industry has quietly joined the war effort, repairing Russian tanks, modernizing aircraft, and supplying optical systems for missiles.

This deployment is now permanent. The December 2024 Treaty on Security Guarantees enabled permanent Russian bases and deployments in Belarus and formally folded the country into Russia’s nuclear deterrence strategy.

The new military doctrine explicitly allows for the deployment and potential use of Russian tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian soil, giving Moscow heightened strategic leverage near NATO’s borders.

Hostile takeover: Economic subjugation

Lukashenka’s latest pivot is not ideological; it’s economic. A nearly $8 billion debt to Russia makes Minsk Moscow’s largest debtor, while Western sanctions have gutted traditional markets, according to the report.

What appears to be economic recovery is, in fact, near-total dependence. Up to 70 percent of Belarus’s exports now flow to Russia, and more than half of its foreign direct investment comes from the East.

This reliance is strategic: at least 287 Belarusian state enterprises are producing weapons, components, or munitions for Russia’s war machine, making the country a crucial node in the Russian military-industrial complex.

The absorption has also hollowed out the country’s once-thriving sectors. The IT industry – once a national success story – has been devastated, with exports dropping 45 percent from 2021 to 2023 and more than nineteen thousand workers fleeing westward.

Lukashenka’s “peace rhetoric” is simply a tactical step for cash, not conscience.

Cultural hegemony and red lines

Moscow is methodically attempting to redefine what it means to be Belarusian. The Kremlin is bankrolling a new Union State joint media holding – budgeted at one billion Russian rubles and set to launch in 2025 – representing a major step toward media integration under Moscow’s direction.

This is coupled with a sharp decline in Belarusian-language teaching (fewer than one in ten pupils study it) and thousands of Kremlin-funded student placements at Russian universities, shaping a generation whose intellectual loyalties point eastward.

If Washington is flirting with calibrated engagement, Brussels is not.

EU foreign-policy scholar Giselle Bosse offered one of the event’s clearest warnings: “The EU must not copy Washington’s approach or repeat the mistakes of re-engagement.”

The EU has formally linked its Belarus and Russia sanctions packages to prevent Minsk from serving as a smuggling corridor for sanctioned goods.

Moreover, the regime’s choices do not reflect public sentiment. Independent polling shows that more than 85 percent of Belarusians oppose sending troops to fight in Ukraine, and two-thirds oppose the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons on their territory.

For frontline states, the threat from Belarus is not theoretical. Grigas described a “hybrid confrontation” underway: weaponized migration pushed toward Poland and Lithuania, and probing operations aimed at testing NATO response times.

Lukashenka’s maneuvers, smiles, and offers are not diplomacy – they are deployment in a broader conflict with the West.

Grigas summed it up: “The future of Belarus is greatly tied to the future of Russia, unfortunately.”

In other words: a thaw with Minsk is not a thaw at all. It is the war on Ukraine – by other means.