Russia is not pursuing an “Anschluss” with Belarus. Rather, it aims to curtail Belarus’s external and internal sovereignty in the foreign policy, military, economic, and domestic institutional realms, stopping short of a political union of Russia and Belarus. The outcome would not amount to an incorporation or absorption, but rather a satellization of Belarus by Russia. It would largely negate Belarus’s sovereignty, which the authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko successfully protected vis-à-vis Russia while extracting economic subsidies from it for the last two decades.
OP-ED
Vladimir Socor: Russia’s interests in Belarus (Part 1)
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with his Belarus' counterpart Alexander Lukashenko in Sochi on Sept. 14, 2020.
