B EL A RUS B EL A RUS
Ukraine’s Bad Neighbor How Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko sacrificed his nation—and his people—to Russian ambitions.
By Markos Kounalakis
V
ladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was criminal on multiple counts, but some of them should be leveled at one of his main accomplices: Belarus’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. Russia’s military executed an unprovoked and unprecedent-
ed attack on a peaceful neighbor on many fronts, from the air and sea. The land war, however, would not have been as lethal were it not for Lukashenko providing a front along Belarus’s southern border, not far from Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. Indeed, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky put it bluntly—Belarus is “not neutral,” he said—when weighing potential negotiations in the country’s capital, Minsk. “Warsaw, Bratislava, Budapest, Istanbul, Baku—we proposed all that to the Russian side,” he said. “Any other city would work for us, too, in a country from whose territory rockets are not being fired.” Belarus is, in fact, far from neutral. It is complicit with the Russian attacks, and Zelensky reckoned that any negotiations on its land would be on enemy territory.
Markos Kounalakis is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and participates in Hoover’s National Security Task Force and its project on China’s Global Sharp Power. 54
H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2022
