Thorn in the Flesh

Belarus is increasingly turning to Russia for military assistance. Roger N. McDermott writes in EDM that

On April 20 Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenka met senior Russian defense officials in Minsk in order to examine mutual security threats and consider ways to deepen bilateral military cooperation. Lukashenka told Sergei Ivanov, Russian Defense Minister, and General Yuri Baluyevsky, Russian Chief of the General Staff, that Belarus looks towards Russia to learn from its experience with military reform, learning from both its successes and failures. He particularly seemed keen to emphasize the role of Belarus as a reliable partner against Western intrusion into the affairs of the former Soviet Union, while criticizing the West for adopting policies of intervention. "We have not bombed Afghanistan into penury and brought some Asian countries to the brink of poverty," he said. "A flood of illegal immigrants washes over Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and other countries to the West."

Behind Lukashenka's anti-Western diatribe and search for stronger security cooperation with Russia lies a curious mixture of old-guard thinking and an assessment of security threats fixated upon the concept of Western intervention near Russia's borders. Colonel-General Leonid Maltsev, Belarusian Defense Minister, addressed a joint board from the defense ministries of both countries in Minsk on April 20, stressing that the joint handling of defense issues and cooperation between the Russian and Belarusian defense ministries laid the basis for strengthening the union state and supporting the Collective Security Treaty. The recent history of bilateral military cooperation, largely generating multiple paper agreements and providing a legislative basis for more practical measures, has persistently escalated in its nature and scope.

While politically Belarus remains "a thorn in the flesh of Kremlin policy planners",

concentration upon intelligence, joint air defense, and the rehearsal of rapid deployment of Russian strategic bombers suggests that planners in Minsk and Moscow are not considering terrorists, first and foremost, as potential future mutual threats, but rather the prospect of Western humanitarian intervention within Belarus as a theoretical flashpoint.