[LINK] "Minsk’s Resistance on Breakaway Republics Reflects Deeper Problems in Russian-Belarusian Rel

[rfmcdonald]

Paul Goble at Window on Eurasia reports on the Belarusian government's continued resistance to Russian initiatives, suggesting that he's playing Europe off against Russia, and that this desire to maximize Belarus' autonomy is why the State Union never had a chance/

Minsk’s latest refusal to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia and even more the suggestion by some officials there that Moscow should “compensate” the Belarusian government to get it to take that step reflect underlying problems in the relationship of the two Slavic countries, according to a leading Moscow analyst.

In an essay posted online today, Sergey Markedonov argues that “the basic problem in Russian-Belarusian relations” is that the two sides entered into “the ‘unification’ process” for entirely different reasons, something that has become increasingly obvious and increasingly annoying to Moscow (www.polit.ru/author/2009/05/26/realizm.html).

For Moscow, the Moscow specialist on ethnic relations in and among the post-Soviet states insists, the Union of the Russian Federation and Belarus was never more than “an ideological project,” something that represented either a move away from “the Belovezhskaya complex” or, especially under Vladimir Putin, yet another “sublimation of Soviet nostalgia.”

But for Minsk, the entire process of a “brotherhood of Slavic states” was completely pragmatic, a policy predicated on the ability of Belarus to make use of Russian resources “for the development of [its own] national model of economics and politics” and thus reinforcing its national independence.

Such “a geopolitical dialectic,” Markedonov continues, was based on the reality that “in Moscow, no one ever considered Minsk an equal partner and ally.” Russian officials rarely consulted with their Belarusian counterparts, and consequently, Alyaksandr Lukashenka was able to realize his own version of the Sinatra doctrine – “I did it my way.”

That approach worked very much to his own advantage. On the one hand, it allowed the Belarusian leader to get aid from Russia while not ignoring his country’s location at the edge of Europe. And on the other, it helped him domestically where any concession to Moscow is likely to be seen as undermining Belarusian independence.

Thoughts?