“He is very weak and will do anything to buy Putin’s support,” she said in a recent interview in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, where she now heads a sort of government-in-exile and where the potential United States ambassador to Minsk will be based is.
On paper, Belarus and Russia have had close ties since the late 1990s, when then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin made an agreement with Mr Lukashenko to create a so-called union state, an agreement the Belarusian leader believed would dominate because Mr Yeltsin was so weak, plagued by health and serious political problems.
However, since Mr Putin replaced Mr Yeltsin in the Kremlin on December 31, 1999, he has put Mr Lukashenko in his place and made it clear that the stillborn union state had to be implemented – with Russia, not Belarus, calling the shots.
Meeting with Mr Lukashenko in Moscow on Friday, Mr Putin said that after years of delays, “serious progress” was finally being made in integrating the countries’ economic, political and military systems.
“We have much to discuss and coordinate our stance on a number of issues,” the Russian president said ominously.
After years of resisting pressure from Moscow to recognize Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, Mr Lukashenko recently said Belarus has accepted that the Black Sea Peninsula is now a de facto part of Russia.
As for the status of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which seceded with Russian backing in 2014 and declared themselves “republics,” Lukashenko said Thursday he would follow Russia’s lead on how they should be treated.
