The veil of uncertainty surrounding Belarus’s short- to medium-term socio-economic prospects continues to thicken. Alexander Chubrik, a reputable economist, writes about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who have arrived in Belarus at the same time. They represent complications in the oil trade, protectionism, COVID-19 and external debt. Plummeting oil prices have played the first fiddle in this quartet, as they have undermined the revenues Moscow planned to extract in 2020 and consequently dashed all hopes that Russia’s demand for Belarusian goods would grow. The collapse in oil prices slashed the Russian ruble, and that immediately increased the dollar prices of Belarus’s exports to Russia. In turn, that made the devaluation of the Belarusian ruble inevitable because without it, Belarus’s export would have declined even more rapidly.
OP-ED
Grigory Ioffe: Belarus’s geopolitical loneliness
Belarus' President Alexander Lukashenko attends a meeting with his Russian counterpart in the Black sea resort of Sochi, on Feb. 7, 2020.
