Supporting Protesters Without Undermining Them

The question then becomes: How can foreign powers support the Belarusian prodemocracy movement without undermining it?

Read: What Belarus learned from the rest of the world

Framing dissent as a product of foreign interference is a well-tested tactic in the autocratic playbook. It’s how Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed protests against him in the run-up to local elections last year. The same argument was made by Chinese authorities in response to the ongoing prodemocracy movement in Hong Kong, which Beijing portrayed as funded by the West.

Lukashenko trumpeted this argument well before the August 9 election, in which he purports to have secured 80 percent of the vote (a result that has widely been dismissed by observers both within and outside the country as rigged). Though many countries expressed concern about the eruption of state violence in Belarus after the vote, it wasn’t until Lukashenko’s inauguration, which was held this week in a secret ceremony in Minsk, that many countries began to formally declare the longtime leader’s rule illegitimate, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Ukraine, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, and Slovakia. Lithuania took its rejection of Lukashenko’s rule one step further by formally recognizing Tikhanovskaya and the opposition’s coordination council as “the only legitimate representatives of the Belarusian people.”

That most countries haven’t gone as far as Lithuania has is, in some ways, to the Belarusian opposition’s advantage: Though Tikhanovskaya has become the symbol of the prodemocracy movement in the country, she has long stressed that her desire is not to lead Belarus, but rather to ensure that it gets free and fair elections. By recognizing Tikhanovskaya as the legitimate president, Lithuania has inadvertently created a conundrum similar to that faced by the U.S. and other countries when they opted to formally recognize Juan Guaidó as the rightful Venezuelan president, despite Nicolás Maduro’s firm entrenchment in power: The symbolism is strong, but it does little to actually effect change, let alone counter the narrative that the West is meddling in affairs that are not its own.

Read: In Washington, the Venezuelan opposition has already won

Tikhanovskaya, for her part, isn’t asking the world to recognize her leadership. She is asking for something more substantial: sanctions. In a meeting with EU leaders in Brussels this week, she urged the bloc to focus its sanctions on individuals involved in the election’s falsification and the subsequent violent crackdown on protesters. The primary goal, she said, is to pressure Lukashenko to enter into a dialogue with the coordination council, the majority of whose members have been detained or forced to flee Belarus. (Lukashenko has so far ruled out meeting with the council, which he has accused of attempting a “coup” against him.)

Some of these sanctions have already started to materialize. Lithuania was the first to impose travel bans on Lukashenko and dozens of other Belarusian officials. Britain announced this week that, in coordination with the U.S. and Canada, it too would be preparing sanctions against “those responsible for serious human rights violations.” The EU is also considering its own sanctions, though it has so far failed to secure the necessary unanimity among its members to implement them—a challenge the bloc’s foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, said puts “our credibility … at stake.”