Belarus Trips and Falls Into Putin’s Trap
French President Emmanuel Macron asks Europe to seek ‘Imperfect Balance’ with Russia
Alfred Adler responsible for introducing the term ‘overcompensation’ in his work ‘Study of Organ Inferiority and Its Physical Compensation’ (1907), said that ‘if people feel inferior and weak in one area, they try to compensate for it somewhere else‘.
It is a trap.
A trap the failing commander-in-chief of Russia Vladimir Putin understands very well. He has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that he has no clue about military strategy. He, however, is excellent at encouraging corruption, exploiting human weaknesses, playing mind games, and acting as if he were already a highly respected historical figure.
In many ways, the former KGB agent is still a KGB agent involved in wresting control from the inside. The events unfolding in Belarus constitute part of Putin’s plan to establish a 21st century imperialism.
He will install a puppet to lead a country. To get rid of democracy, he will give puppets manuals on how to destroy it, and repeatedly encourage them to become dictators for life. As Putin entrenches the Russian system in the country, the target country and the puppet leader will become completely dependent on Putin and the Russian government.
It is a relationship in which Putin holds all the cards, while the puppet has nothing but a name plate.
It was not Vladimir Putin who installed Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator. Before Vladimir Putin took control of Russia, Lukashenko became the President of Belarus after the country broke from the Soviet Union in 1994.
Putin used Lukashenko’s desire for power to cultivate his subservience.
“After rigging a presidential election and beginning a brutal crackdown on popular protests in 2020, Lukashenka found himself in deep international isolation. He survived only thanks to the support of Russia — but initially delayed negotiations with President Vladimir Putin over the price of this assistance”.
Throughout his time in office, Putin has pushed Lukashenka to allow Russia to control Belarus’ economic assets. The strategy is to entrench Russian power within the region. Lukashenka has refused to hand over control of the nation’s assets, because a dictator always knows what another dictator wants. But after Russia invaded Ukraine, the equation changed.
Putin wanted Belarus to join the Ukraine war, but Lukashenka saw the danger it posed to his survival. If Putin loses, which looks more likely, then he’ll take down Lukashenka with him.
Like China, Lukashenko maintained strategic distance from Russia’s war with Ukraine. He offered some assistance, but he didn’t tie his legs to Putin’s hands.
Lukashenko overcompensated for his refusal to join the war by allowing Russia to take control of some of the nations defense assets.
The Kremlin will likely subsume elements of Belarus’ defense industrial base (DIB) as part of Moscow’s larger effort to reequip the Russian military to support a protracted war against Ukraine. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko stated during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on February 17 that Belarus’ aerospace industry is ready to produce Su-25 ground attack aircraft for the Russian military with the support of Russian technology transfers.
As and when the war ends, if Putin remains Russia’s leader, Belarusian military industrial base will forever be tied to the Russian military. Their independence is gone.
Putin did the same in Syria
Putin used a similar strategy to expand their influence in the middle east. When the world was about to overthrow Syrian dictator Al Bashar, Russia intervened to hold the government together. By protecting the dictator, Putin has allowed Russia to deeply embed itself inside Syria.
Moscow established control of western and central Syrian airspace and an agreement granting it a permanent military presence in the Eastern Mediterranean for at least the next 49 years, realizing a strategic aspiration that eluded Russian czars and Soviet leaders. Moscow has retained the Tartus facility in Syria since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, but the Syria intervention afforded Moscow the opportunity to modernize and expand Tartus and establish a new air base in Khmeimim. Russia has never had a military position this deep and broad on the Eastern Mediterranean before, and it has now secured long-term guarantees for sustaining this presence.
Moscow considers this foothold critical for deterring the West and projecting power into NATO’s southern flank and amplifying Moscow’s intelligence-gathering opportunities against the United States and its partners in favor of Russia’s interests. Russia’s secure position in Syria also bolsters its presence in the Black Sea; indeed Crimea played an important role in Moscow’s plans for Syria. Russia’s Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol, a key to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, has supported Russia’s Syria intervention since the beginning.
While all this sounds like the story of a strategic dictator with a long-term outlook, it is not. As far as Putin’s governance capacity is concerned, you can see the signature of a clandestine agency working in the background to increase the power of its country in a foreign land.
The Russian president has never been able to deliver on other things that are essential for a successful nation, such as economic governance, reducing corruption, and improving business climate. Despite all the talk, Russian economy is far away from the top five countries in the world
With eleven time zones and abundant natural resources, Russia is the world’s largest country in terms of land mass. Yet it still falls outside the top ten economies. The United Kingdom, Germany and Japan are much smaller countries than Russia, but their GDP per capita is way higher than Russia’s.
Putin is good at playing agent, not president. He is out of his depth. And that is where the world’s problems begin.
He can’t stop. The fire he started has already spread too far for him to contain. The extremist nationalist wing he has created to keep Russia under his control is too powerful to contain. If he loses the war with Ukraine, the nationalists inside Russia will certainly knock him out.
A Putin Win
There is no reason for Putin not to redo the whole thing five years from now if he walks away with Crimea. Or if he walks away with a small part of Donetsk and Luhansk because Europe has grown tired of a two year war.
It is likely that Putin will demand that trade barriers be lifted during negotiations so that Russian commodities can be sold throughout the globe. At its peak, Russia was bringing in a billion dollars a day selling commodities. One billion dollars a day is not a terrible place to start rebuilding the economy, and perhaps even start rebuilding the military.
Then the next set of adventures will begin.
Putin will repeat this strategy over and over again. Clearly, this man and economic governance do not belong together.
Every time there is an election, he will turn to another country to hide his failure. Taking the risk of a coup is never an option for him. To achieve this, he must keep the nation focused on the outside, not the inside.
There were plenty of moments during the recent Munich Security Conference that gave me confidence that the west is still moving forward in terms of Ukraine.
For starters, French President Emmanuel Macron called out Vladimir Putin for lying to him last year.
“A year ago I spoke to Putin and he assured me Russia had nothing to do with the Wagner Group,” he told an audience at the Munich Security Conference. “I accepted that,” he said.
In the last twelve months, it has become clear that the Wagner group always does what Putin wants it to do. Macron has called out Putin for lying to him. It is a massive statement that no future President of France will be able to ignore. It is a statement that will constantly weigh on French-Russian relations in the future.
Macron has changed the France-Russia relations forever.
The biggest surprise during the security conference came from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. After taking his time approving German tanks for Ukraine, Olaf Scholz turned the tables on the allies by asking them to donate tanks.
Mr. Scholz’s address was notable in part for his aggressive call for more military supplies to Kyiv. Weeks earlier, he had been under intense pressure from NATO allies over his reluctance to approve the supply of Germany’s modern Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
“All those who can actually supply battle tanks of this kind should do so,” Mr. Scholz said on Friday, adding that he and other top German officials would be “canvassing intensely for this” in Munich.
Putin’s actions in Belarus, Syria and Ukraine makes it very clear that this former KGB agent will not stop toppling governments and invading foreign countries.
This is all he knows to do.
If the world wants peace tomorrow, Putin has to be defeated today.
