Lukashenka’s last hope

The dictator no longer counts on Moscow’s saving him from the upcoming crisis.

Lukashenka’s visit to Beijing starts today. A Russian political scientist Andrei Suzdaltsev is discussing its motives and purposes on the politoboz.com web-site.

“It is symptomatic that exactly now, in the middle of July, the head of the Belarusian state rushed across whole Eurasia to the Pacific coast. Apparently, the Belarusian leadership can no longer afford waiting for a favorable turn of events. The majority of the country’s enterprises continue either manufacturing for stock, or start halting due to the absence of sales. Negative trends in foreign trade retain and are even grow; foreign reserves, to which loans are ascribed according to a weird Belarusian tradition, remain insufficient for mitigating more or less significant crisis phenomena in the economy; slowly, but steadily financial problems are approaching”, - the political scientist writes.

In general, the socio-economic situation in Belarus is not improving, but is steadily worsening, he believes. The latest tranches of the Eurasians Economic Community anti-crisis fund’s loan, which were initially meant as the starting capital for large-scale structural reforms in Belarusian economy, are in the end contributing to the conservation of the old authoritarian system of managing the national economy. The latest sixth tranche is a sort of a point of no return, since a financial chasm can already be noticed behind it. No new large-scale loans from Russia are anticipated in the near future.

“Belarusian authorities are facing quite a real threat of another devaluation of the national currency, probably even deeper than in 2011. It is worth mentioning that for the last year the Belarusian authorities have been busy with pumping the average salary up to 600 dollars, ostentatiously ignoring the experience of 2010. It is clear that the possible collapse of the new financial and currency pyramid, created by Belarusian authorities in the spirit of MMM, may lead to hard political consequences. This time they will not be able to blame it on Russian and the buyers of European cars”, - Andrei Suzdaltsev writes.

The political scientist reminds that it was Russia that saved Lukashenka from the consequences of the 2011 devaluation, but now it will be just inappropriate to ask Moscow again. It turns out that Belarus lives from a loan to a loan, insistently increasing the black hole in its economy, where billions of loans, pulled out of Russia, disappear. Apart from that this year Lukashenka already asked for 2 billion dollars from the Russian leadership for “modernization”, and even for 5 billion offstage. However, Moscow hinted at speeding up the integration processes and the readiness to provide loans, secured with privatization, which caused quite a painful reaction of the Belarusian ruler.

In Andrei Suzdaltsev’s opinion, Beijing remains Lukashenka’s last hope for salvation from collapse.

“However, the philosophy of the Belarusian-Chinese relations is exceptionally complicated and, what is the most important, is not balanced. It comprises two directly opposite tasks: on the one hand, Minsk needed to find a replacement for pragmatic Russian as a monopolist sponsor, on the other hand the friendship with Beijing was supposed to make Moscow more amenable to Minsk’s constant requests for financial and resource support. The Belarusian leadership made a bet on the Chinese issue’s being under the Kremlin’s special control and that the Belarusian blackmail was destined to be successful, as Lukashenka hoped. Ideally, Minsk counted that it would be able to provoke a competition for Belarus between Russian and China”, - Andrei Suzdaltsev believes.