No Person Out of Reach: A Conversation with Professor Kanstantsin Dzehtsiarou about the Political Climate in Belarus

Professor Dzehtsiarou seated. Photo provided by Kanstantsin Dzehtsiarou.  

On May 23, 2021, a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania was grounded in Minsk, the capital of the Eastern European state of Belarus. The plane was intercepted by a fighter jet and forced to land under the pretense that there was a bomb aboard planted by Hamas. Yet when the plane landed, it was Roman Protasevich, a co-founder and a former editor of the NEXTATelegram channel, one of the most popular dissident networks in Belarus, that was seized from the plane. 

In the year preceding the Ryanair flight, Belarus had been embroiled in protests to depose President  Aleksandr G. Lukashenko after a violent election that was widely seen as fictitious and resulted in many election opponents being arrested. The peaceful, mass protests were met with a brutal response from Lukashenko, whose police arbitrarily detained and tortured protestors, journalists, and opposition leaders. Many, including Protasevich, were forced to flee abroad and live in exile. 

The forcible seizure and arrest of a journalist flying between two secondary European states for simply flying over Belarus elicited intense reactions from western nations. Immediately, international figures and representatives of European countries spoke of “state hijacking” and an unprecedented violation of international law. The United States, the European Union, Great Britain, and Canada agreed to impose sanctions on Belarus, targeting its main export, potash, and government financial institutions. Yet, there remains a wild-card player in this unfolding story with Belarus: Russia, and more specifically President Vladimir Putin, backing up Lukashenko. 

The situation that has been unfolding in Eastern Europe presents a balancing act of condemning human rights violations in Belarus and attempting to contain the influence of Russia. I talked to Kanstantsin Dzehtsiarou, Professor of Human Rights Law at the University of Liverpool, about how the Ryanair flight fits into the ever-evolving Belarussian political landscape and the ramifications it has on human rights. 

The seizure of Roman Protasevich off of the Ryanair flight is the main instance in which Belarus has been in the news. But, over the past year, there has been an uproar over the violent treatment of protesters in the wake of their presidential election. Can you give more light on the deeper political situation happening in Belarus and maybe some events that led up to the Ryanair flight?

Belarus was in the news before the Ryanair flight was forcefully landed in Minsk, mostly because of the major political crisis that is still unraveling in Belarus. In a way, another issue that's worth mentioning is how sensational the media is—people have been arrested and tortured and ill-treated in Belarus, at least on this major scale, since July 2020. And Belarus ends up in the news when the airplane is landed. Well, it's an outrageous violation of international law. But, in fact, none of the E.U. citizens who were on board of this airplane got hurt. However, the reaction of the European Union and the U.S. and everybody else was absolutely serious, much more serious than it was in relation to all those negative processes that have been happening in Belarus since July, August 2020. 

To answer your question, basically what is happening in Belarus is a failed revolution that then led to an incredible level of repression. To give the timeline, around last year in June 2020, the presidential election campaign got started. A number of unpredictable and quite high profile presidential candidates actually expressed their willingness to run as candidates. So we have Viktar Babaryka, who was a CEO of one of the banks in Belarus, Valer Tsapkala, who was the head of an I.T. company or hub of companies working in Belarus, and a famous blogger, Sergei Tikhanovsky. And so these three people created quite a view of political momentum in Belarus, and usually what is a very passive and not very political population of Belarus became more "entertained."

At the same time, there were plenty of movements by the government that were quite unpopular. First of all, Belarusian authorities didn't actually do anything meaningful to tackle COVID. The economic situation of Belarus was not that great. And so these issues were triggers for more enthusiastic involvement of people into this process. And in response to this process, even before the election candidates were registered, two of them were arrested. Tikhanovsky and Babaryka are still in prison in Belarus. But, the wife of Tikhanovsky was registered as one of the potential candidates. So to cut a long story short, she ran. She was obviously a very, very popular candidate, huge rallies, et cetera, et cetera. But official results said that the former President—as I think he's a former president, because he wasn't properly elected—got 80% of the votes, while as a very popular presidential candidate, Tikhanovskay got about 9%. 

So that sparked protests, and these protests were quite widespread. But they led to a serious reaction. Basically, they were forcefully dispersed. Some people were tortured in the Minsk detention center. And I think this led to an even bigger response from the people. So we were talking about thousands and thousands of people in Minsk peacefully protesting. And these protests were going on until the beginning of winter. And then in winter, it is cold in Belarus. The protests actually died down a little bit, quite significantly, to be honest with you. And that's when the real repression started to unravel. Huge amounts of criminal cases, plenty of people in detention, those most active, most involved, were forced to go abroad in exile. And this is going on now and continuing now. And one of the episodes of this story, was the forceful landing of a Ryanair airplane with Roman Protasevich on board.

So, that's the timeline and Roman Protasevich is alive, which is good news, and his girlfriend is also alive. And he is obviously kept as a hostage by the KGB in Belarus and he just started "his" Twitter account a couple of days back. And I'm not an expert in political science, I'm an expert in human rights, I can tell you that almost every single human right has been violated in Belarus since June 2020. Every single political right that can exist was actually massively violated by the government. 

It seems to me that the detention of Roman Protasevich from the Ryanair flight constituted an enormous expenditure of political capital for Belarus. It obviously put them on the front pages of every major newspaper and angered all of their western allies. So, why did Belarus take that risk, and why did they single out Protasevich on the Ryanair flight? 

Well, we need to take into account the role of a particular personal history. There are a lot of analytics that say that actually, Lukashenko treats Protasevich as a personal enemy, and this is his personal vendetta against him so that he can show that nobody is safe, even if you go abroad. Even if you live abroad, there are means of actually getting to you. And this is a very powerful symbol. And I have to say that the relationship with western partners of Belarus had already been non-existent by this time. So sanctions were initiated, et cetera, et cetera. And another issue that can be discussed is the fact that the Belarusian government didn't expect that scope, that scale of reaction. So it could have been an impulsive sort of reaction. It is clear that it was a difficult decision to make, because if you look at the air, you can see that the plane was almost gone from Belarusian airspace. And at the last point, they forced it to return. 

Another reason is that for Lukashenko, and for his closer circle, everything that is happening outside is of secondary importance. For him, the primary target is this solution of the internal problems, like the creation of an atmosphere of fear that everybody can be taken and captured and found and that nobody's safe. So, from their perspective, the external reaction matters much less than the creation of a particular symbolism within Belarus. 

So a lot of western countries such as the U.S., the European Union, Britain, and Canada agreed to impose sanctions on Belarus. But as you stated, there have been sanctions in place on Belarus before the Ryanair flight, and yet human rights violations continued to happen within the country. So, would you say that sanctions are either not enough or there should be more varied international pressure on Belarus to either reform or change the way they treat their citizens? 

First of all, when we talk about sanctions, we need to consider Russia in all these difficult games [and] charades surrounding Belarus because if Russia was not supporting Lukashenko, his regime would have fallen in August. But Putin, not Russia in general—we shouldn't actually equate Russia and Putin—Putin supports Lukashenko. Putin is not particularly happy, nor is he sure what comes next. Lukashenko is a known evil, so to speak. The second thing is that if the Belarusian revolution was successful, it was very peaceful, that could have been a very strong message to the Russian people that the revolutions like that can win. And that would obviously be a very negative thing for Putin, who is pretty much the same as Lukashenko to a major extent.

Now, coming back to the question about sanctions. Looking at the history of sanctions, I would say that sanctions depend on many different factors, when sanctions work and when sanctions do not work. First of all, it takes time. They cannot suffocate the regime immediately. It's not military occupation, which I don't obviously support in any way, shape, or form. But sanctions are a long-term tool that is [sic] not capable of flipping regimes immediately. Sanctions against Iran have been going on for years. And well, not a lot tangibly is going on there. Of course, Iran is not Belarus. But you know, the success of sanctions doesn't depend only on the sanctions, it depends on many different other factors that come into play when we are talking about the reliance on sources that are cut out by sanctions from the point of view of the regime. So basically, if I have one source of funding, and the sanction is cutting out the source of sanctions that I suffer a lot. If that is not the case, and in the Belarussian case, it is not immediately the case, then I wouldn't suffer that much. 

And another thing that is very much on the minds of politicians in the European capitals [and] in the U.S. is that if we do too much, Belarus might become a complete satellite of Russia, it will be absorbed by Russia, which is a very negative consequence of this for everyone. I don't think that this will happen to be honest, because Russia doesn't need it either. But that is something that was going on for years. And that's how Lukashenko is in power for so long. Because he was very clever in playing this course, by saying that if you push too much, Putin is not that concerned about human rights at all. And therefore, we will just become part of Russia. As a result, these negotiations usually end up in favor of Lukashenko. And then we can see that actually, nothing really changes. We'll see. Like, we can see now that the economic situation in Belarus is worsening. It's difficult there. And I think that in some areas, the sanctions do hurt. So we'll see how it's gonna change long term, hard to predict. 

What else can be done? There were ideas of disconnecting Belarus from Swift, this banking system that uses the credit card. Well, it will hurt but also it will hurt normal people who are those who should be protected. When talking about sanctions, there are plenty of dilemmas that need to be very clearly articulated. Should it be targeted sanctions or general sanctions on the whole population? So, you know, it's very difficult. 

What does the future for Belarus look like, both internally and in the context of its European neighbors, and that balance between Europe and Russia?

On a note about mutual trusts: mutual trust is an asset, you know, like trustworthiness is an asset. If nobody trusts you, nobody deals with you, and you can not be integrated in the global world. Look at North Korea. It is hard to function as a nation these days if nobody trusts you. It also depends on what sorts of laws we are talking about. Now, if you violate trade law, the other side will violate trade law in your respect. Since there is something called reciprocity, if you don't comply with a particular rule, the other side will not comply with the same rule and it will be a lose-lose situation. It depends of course, the theory of reciprocity does not act properly, when we're talking about human rights laws. It's stupid to assume that if Belarus doesn't comply with the provision that prohibits to torture people, it would be appropriate for the United Kingdom to come to my home and torture me as a reciprocal measure for Belarus, torturing their own nation. That would be nonsense. But in many other cases, it would. If you  violate a bilateral investment treaty, nobody will invest in your country and you will miss out. What is happening in Belarus will have long lasting consequences. And there is something which is called rule of law. Rule of law is predictability of laws. It's legal certainty, which is the fact that rules are the same for everyone like for normal people, for the government, etc. So this crisis shows that there is no proper rule of law in Belarus. That rule of law exists only until it is necessary to change it, you know. And then when that happens, no trust is possible. Like how can you trust someone? When do you know that the rule that you rely on can be changed over a minute? 

I am sure that what's happening now cannot last long because Belarus is turning into a police state. And I don't think that with the internet this police state can exist for long. I hope that I'm not wrong on that. So a number of possibilities can happen. There is a lot of discussion of the new referendum, but how this referendum is going to be organized in the circumstances like now when everyone is effectively in fear. I'm not too sure what else can be done, why Protasevich was released, what's the game that they're trying to play now. I just don't have enough facts to discuss. Now, on the one hand, they release Protasevich. On the other hand, just yesterday they announced the sentence to Babaryka, one of the potential presidential candidates, and he was sentenced to 14 years in prison. And this is the longest sentence that any of the opposition presidential candidates ever got. The normal prison sentence for opposition candidates in Belarus is five years. So it's a risky business to become a candidate in Belarus. But so you see, the situation is so unpredictable that effectively anything can happen. And there will be elections to the Russian Duma this year, and I think this also can have some consequences. We also need to see how the pandemic is going to affect all the situations. In political research, there is a term called black holes which is a factor that is not known now but can actually flip the whole situation very, very quickly, and I think that the Belarusian situation is full of these black holes. You know, every step can actually lead to many different unpredictable results. So in these circumstances, it's very difficult to really predict what's going to happen even until the New Year, it can be possible that Lukashenko is not going to be president in 2022. But it's also possible that he will be president for quite a few years from now. 

Belarus stands on a crossroads of West versus Russia, a police state versus rebellion. What the event featuring Roman Protasevich indicates is that a show of strength, a move inherited from its Russian neighbors, is a prize worth risking it all for. The rest of the world watches, trying to enter the stage as well by imposing sanctions and moving to remind Belarus of the importance of international law, but whether these moves are successful, whether the situation in Belarus resolves in favor of authoritarianism or towards the will of the people, remains the great unknown. 

Katerina Kaganovich is a senior editor at CPR and a sophomore at Barnard College studying political science and economics. She is an intern with the U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York interested in American government and jurisprudence.