Swallowing the Red Pill: Trump, Lukashenka, and the Cycles of Western Normalization with Belarus
by Grigory Ioffe
On November 17, Poland reopened two border crossings with Belarus. The Kuźnica checkpoint had been closed in 2021 amid the migrant crisis at the Belarusian border, while the Bobrowniki crossing was suspended in 2023 after Belarus sentenced Andrzej Poczobut, a Grodno-based journalist and Polish community organizer, to an eight-year prison term.
Warsaw had planned to reopen the crossings weeks earlier, having apparently reached some kind of a deal with Minsk. However, Warsaw reluctantly delayed its decision due to solidarity with Lithuania, which on October 29 closed its own border crossings with Belarus to protest the launch of cross-border meteorological balloons carrying cheap Belarusian cigarettes. In response, Minsk claimed that this smuggling operation was entirely organized and directed by Lithuanian citizens.
Despite tensions with its Baltic neighbors, Belarus still maintains a visa-free regime for Lithuanians, Latvians, and Poles, and cigarettes are one of the key items routinely purchased en masse by Lithuanians, who most frequently take advantage of the visa-free travel to Belarus despite their government’s persistent requests to cease this activity. Even so Vilnius has now declared its border with Belarus reopened as of November 20—well ahead of previous announcements and in stark contradiction to the intransigent stance emphasized by Lithuanian Prime Minister Inga Ruginienė on many recent occasions.
Aside from these place-specific considerations, what has prompted this latest tentative—and possibly inconsequential—rapprochement between Belarus and its western neighbors is the unexpected appointment of John Coale as President Trump’s Special Envoy to Belarus and his upcoming second visit to Minsk. In this way, the U.S. president has signaled that Washington’s relationship with Minsk now holds a special, elevated status—compelling its junior allies in the region to play along with American efforts to engage Minsk.
One arguably bizarre aspect of Coale’s appointment is that it bypasses routine U.S. diplomatic channels. Whereas Belarus’s embassy in Washington has never stopped functioning—albeit with a chargé d’affaires (currently Pavel Shidlovsky) as the top diplomat—the U.S. embassy in Minsk largely remains empty, with its staff residing nearby in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. This situation dates back to 2020, when, in response to the post-election protests in Minsk and the ensuing emigration of opposition presidential hopeful Svetlana Tikhanovskaya to Lithuania, the newly appointed U.S. ambassador Julie Fisher made numerous statements that Minsk perceived as hostile. Belarus declined to issue her a visa, then withdrew its earlier agrément.
Although there have been two changes of guard at the U.S. State Department since then, the inertia in that entity’s actions (or inactions) appears out of step with the quick paced decision-making at the White House. This appointment, obviously, means that despite the lasting demonization of Alexander Lukashenka, his fortunes in the eyes of the United States have improved. For those unversed in Belarus-watching, this may seem surprising: a “brutal dictator” and Vladimir Putin’s closest ally is once again deemed an important interlocutor by the U.S. president, who has twice referred to Lukashenka as a “highly respected” statesman.
Crackdown vs Rapprochement: The Patterns of Normalization
Most seasoned Belarus-watchers, however, are hardly surprised. They have witnessed multiple Western normalization cycles with Lukashenka following seemingly irredeemable anathemas. That was the case after the 1996 constitutional crisis in Minsk, when Lukashenka essentially extended his term by two years and cracked down on the legislative branch. It happened again in 1998, after Lukashenka evicted several Western ambassadors from their residences for being too close to his own. It also followed the 2001, 2006, and 2010 presidential elections, which sparked post-election protests of ever-growing intensity—responding to ever-growing Western backing for the opposition. This, in turn, led to ever-harsher crackdowns on those protests, even as a significant portion of the electorate (possibly up to a half, if not more) remained loyal to Lukashenka.
Belarus’s late foreign minister Vladimir Makei once predicted in 2020, shortly before his death, that the lag between crackdown and rapprochement would be longer than usual—and this has proven true. Assuming the “regime” is stronger than it seems and enjoys a solid base of support, Makei also warned the West against rocking the boat. To Western policymakers, a solid base of support for an authoritarian regime often seems inconceivable; their worldview posits that no people would tolerate an autocrat. Yet they often do, in many parts of the world—as even Belarusian opposition-minded pollsters confirm when it comes to Belarus. The sheer number of times Western leaders have reconciled with Lukashenka after irreconcilable rebukes only bolsters his domestic support.
This may be especially true today, when the early stages of reconciliation coincide with: a) the exiled opposition having lost most of its domestic support base, and even some of it in Poland and Lithuania (where most Belarusians who fled the 2020 crackdown on post-election protests and ongoing repressions now reside); b) high-level corruption in Ukraine, with which many East Slavs (Belarusians, Russians, and Ukrainians) compare Belarus; and c) the activation of American attempts to end the war between Russia and Ukraine—attempts that have solicited and received support from Minsk.
Accordingly, events in Belarus account for only a partial explanation of the fractured rhythm in its relations with the West—the oscillations observed over decades. The missing piece resides in the worldview of Western foreign policymakers. Three aspects come to mind.
First, as this author has underscored on numerous occasions, foreign policy decision-makers in the West have been “blue-pilled” when it comes to Belarus (in reference to the term used in popular film series The Matrix). In their judgment, the regime’s lack of democracy is all that matters to Belarusians, so they expect the populace to embrace the liberal, democratic West. In fact, a modicum of homework on Belarus would reveal it as a country with unfinished nation-building, divided along cultural and geopolitical lines, where authoritarianism fits local traditions—so much so that anyone lacking a strongman aura would scarcely qualify as a leader in the eyes of many Belarusians.
Second, the tenacious perceptual inertia about Belarus may be attributed to now-defunct entities like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. In Belarus, their emissaries behaved like bulls in a china shop: routinely cozying up to the self-proclaimed “democratic” opposition, funding their activities, and establishing an echo chamber that Western sponsors invariably mistook to be the only authentic source of information about Belarusians and the situation inside Belarus.
The third aspect of this worldview is an idealistic, all-or-nothing mindset. An anecdote shared by Dźmitry Hurnievič of the Belarusian Service of Radio Liberty illustrates this point. He encountered a Belarus travel blog by Polish citizen Tomasz Jakimiuk that infuriated many opposition-minded Belarusians and Poles but delighted Hurnievič. On Facebook he explained why: “Those outraged were outraged by the fact,” writes Hurnievič, “that Yakimiuk does not talk about Belarus as the European North Korea... But Belarus is NOT ONLY about this… Yakimiuk showed something else. What Belarusian cities and villages look like… This is exactly what is missing in Poland about Belarus… That is why Yakimiuk’s videos have triggered so many people in Poland, because they break away from black and white narratives: that there is hell on the planet, or at the other extreme—that Belarus is paradise and an island of stability.”
Converging Realisms: Belarus and the United States
By the same token, when news broke of Trump’s appointment of Coale as special envoy to Belarus, another BSRL associate posed this question to Andrei Korobkov of Middle Tennessee State University: “If I understood you correctly, one of Trump’s goals is to pull Belarus out of Russia’s orbit.” Korobkov’s response hit the mark: “I don’t think that Trump, unlike his predecessors, is counting on taking Belarus out of the Russian orbit. It’s enough for him that Lukashenko will somehow maneuver, give something, create some platforms that are useful for the Americans. Trump is a hard-core realist. This means not only that he evaluates politics and political decisions from the point of view of power as such, not ideology, but he is also a realist in the sense that he knows the limits of his influence.”
A hard-core realist who knows the limits of his influence. Arguably, this is the point of convergence between Trump and Lukashenka—and the point of divergence between them, on one hand, and Western democracy activists and modern West European foreign policy decision-makers, on the other. The latter think in idealistic all-or-nothing terms; the former achieve desired outcomes, if only in part. Yes, the Belarusian president is an autocrat; yes, he enjoys considerable domestic support; and yes, there is ample room for normal life in Belarus—life that not only Belarusians themselves but also some Western guests perceive as normal.
This perception is exacerbated by several facets of tangible reality. Though he became a willy-nilly co-aggressor against Ukraine in 2022, Lukashenka also has shielded Belarusians from immediate participation in the war: they are neither bombed like Ukrainians nor conscripted like Ukrainians and Russians, or even dispatching its military forces to fight side by side with Moscow in its ongoing war.
In retrospect, however, Lukashenka has always favored maintaining ties with both Russia and the West, balancing his relations with Moscow similar to the way Kazakhstan deals with Russia, skillfully resisting Russian expansionism. Moreover, at one point Lukashenka expelled the Russian ambassador for treating Belarus like a Russian federal district. In the final analysis, Lukashenka’s demonstrated political skills are far more out of proportion to the small country he leads, having survived Western sanctions for decades and is now on the verge of normalizing relations with the United States.
About the Author:
Grigory Ioffe is Professor Emeritus, Radford University. Dr. Ioffe is the author of: Understanding Belarus and How Western Foreign Policy Misses the Mark, published in 2008 and more recently Reassessing Lukashenka: Belarus in a Cultural and Geopoltical Context. He also has published several hundred articles on Belarus.