Brussels Faces Off With ‘Europe’s Last Dictator’

Judah Grunstein 

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For decades, the president of Belarus, known as “Europe’s last dictator,” has been a thorn in the side of the continent’s democracies. But the threat Alexander Lukashenko poses to European security suddenly grew more serious Sunday, when his security forces—with the help of a transparently false cover story and an armed MiG-29 fighter jet—forced a commercial airliner flying over Belarusian airspace to land in Minsk in order to arrest Roman Protasevich, a reporter associated with the opposition-in-exile who was on the flight.

The incident internationalized what had been an internal political crisis within Belarus and immediately resulted in sanctions from the European Union and the U.K., including the banning of overflights of Belarus by European carriers and the suspension of landing rights to Belarus’ national airline.

Lukashenko’s repression of dissent and the political opposition in Belarus has ebbed and flowed over the years, usually in rhythm with the country’s electoral calendar. That often meant rounding up political opponents or otherwise blocking their activities in the run-up to stage-managed elections, only to relax those controls to curry favor with the European Union and its member states after the voting was over. But increasingly in recent years, it also meant paying lip service to reforms designed to keep political and economic channels with Brussels open, thereby avoiding too deep a dependence on Russia.

That all changed last year in the run-up to and aftermath of last year’s presidential election, when the Belarusian opposition and public went off-script. Massive popular protests and a surprisingly effective proxy candidacy by a jailed opponent’s wife forced Lukashenko’s hand. The brutal repression of the protests that followed had already triggered a round of EU sanctions, driving an isolated Lukashenko deeper into the embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now the crisis has become a test of the EU’s ability to impose costs on a tyrant who is flaunting not only European values of democracy and human rights, but also international norms.

In her column this week, Frida Ghitis explained how Lukashenko’s flagrant breach of international norms is part of a growing trend of transnational repression, where authoritarian regimes target dissidents for intimidation, kidnapping, rendition and even assassination far beyond their own borders.

In February, Dan Peleschuk examined how the EU could still exert pressure on Lukashenko to shift his calculus, provided Brussels was willing to think creatively about the leverage at its disposal.

Back in August 2020, Dan looked at the unprecedented popular mobilization against Lukashenko ahead of the presidential election, which united the usually divided opposition and spread far outside the capital to areas that Lukashenko usually counted on for his base of support.

And back in February 2020, Brian Whitmore looked at why Lukashenko had grown increasingly wary in recent years of being trapped in Putin’s orbit, an outcome that he has now been forced to accept.