For a few hours on Saturday, as troops loyal to the renegade warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin marched on Moscow, the Belarusian opposition in exile believed Day X had arrived.
That is how the democratic forces coalesced around Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who fled Belarus in 2020 after Alexander Lukashenko rigged a presidential vote and then ruthlessly crushed massive protests, refer to the day they hope to overthrow the Moscow-backed dictator.
As the news of Prigozhin’s extraordinary mutiny broke on Saturday morning, Tsikhanouskaya convened a video call of her “transitional cabinet”, half based in Vilnius and half in Warsaw, to begin implementing the plan for Day X.
“We were preparing for the storming of the Kremlin by Prigozhin’s troops and [subsequently] instability inside Belarus,” Tsikhanouskaya said in a telephone interview.
Her cabinet made contact with a Belarusian regiment fighting as part of the Ukrainian army and readied a plan to activate partisan groups inside Belarus to perform a series of actions aimed at paralysing the regime, Tsikhanouskaya said.
“We got a lot of signals from inside Belarus that people were ready and waiting to go to the streets,” said Pavel Latushka, a former Belarusian culture minister who is now a key opposition leader.
Then, on Saturday evening, an unexpected announcement put an end to the Day X excitement, just as it was building. Prigozhin turned his troops back after a deal negotiated by the unlikeliest of brokers – Lukashenko himself.
The Belarusian leader announced he had spent the day talking to Prigozhin, and claimed he had persuaded the warlord to call off his march on Moscow in exchange for safe passage to exile in Belarus for Prigozhin and his Wagner group fighters.
The announcement initially met with widespread scepticism. But the Kremlin confirmed the contours of the deal, the FSB dropped its case against Prigozhin, and on Tuesday Vladimir Putin thanked Lukashenko for his help in resolving the crisis. It all amounted to a remarkable political coup for the Belarusian leader.
“Putin was in the weakest position during his whole rule, he called Lukashenko and Lukashenko helped him,” said Pavel Slunkin, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and former Belarusian diplomat.
On Tuesday in Minsk, Lukashenko gathered his top security officials for a televised all-day boasting session, during which he spun lengthy anecdotes about how the negotiations had gone down.
At one point, he even suggested he had talked Putin out of killing Prigozhin. “I said to Putin: ‘Yes we could take him out, it wouldn’t be a problem, if it doesn’t work the first time then it would the second.’ I told him: ‘Don’t do it, because afterwards there will be no negotiations and these guys will be ready to do anything.’”
Lukashenko is a famously unreliable narrator – he once claimed his father was killed fighting in the second world war, a conflict that ended nine years before Lukashenko was born – so it pays not to take all his claims about the day at face value, but it is clear he did play a significant role.
Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, has long been an ally of Russia but a slippery one, taking Moscow’s money while constantly looking to cement alliances in the west to counterbalance the threat of a full Russian takeover.
That deft balancing act came to an end in 2020 when Moscow helped him to crush mass unrest. Since then, Belarus has in effect become a vassal state of Russia, and the Kremlin has used Belarusian territory to launch its invasion of Ukraine and as a base for troops and equipment.
Putin has even promised to transfer Russian nuclear weapons to Belarus this summer, which many fear would provide a pretext for Russia to introduce troops at any moment, ostensibly to protect the weapons.
All this has severely restricted Lukashenko’s room for manoeuvre, and part of the reason for his enthusiastic trumpeting of his middle-man role appears to be a desire to prove he is no mere minion.
“This is the way he wanted to show to his nomenklatura that he is still capable, and that he still has a kind of autonomy and is not just a puppet of the Kremlin,” Slunkin said.
The Russian president is unlikely to thank Lukashenko for making public details of the bargaining. “Lukashenko did a standup routine in front of his generals and explained how basically he single-handedly saved Russia. Lukashenko humiliated Putin and Putin will never forgive this,” Latushka said.
Putin and Lukashenko have long had a fractious personal relationship beneath the public bonhomie, but now more than ever they appear to be stuck with each other, however irritated the Russian president may be by Lukashenko’s boasting.
While this means security guarantees for Lukashenko’s regime, there is another side to the coin of their intertwined fates. If Prigozhin’s aborted coup proves to be just the start of a seriously turbulent period for the Kremlin, Lukashenko’s rule will also become harder to sustain.
“He wouldn’t last a single day without Putin,” Tsikhanouskaya said.
