The mutiny led by the Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin on the weekend has given rise to a dazzling variety of interpretations and predictions. The only thing they all agree on is that the biggest winner from the dramatic events is the Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, who seemingly brokered a peace deal between Prigozhin and the Kremlin.
Right now, Lukashenko is very much the man of the hour, and is visibly enjoying his diplomatic coup. Yet his role in bringing the mutiny to a peaceful conclusion has sealed his transformation from an international leader to an influential grandee within Russia itself.
The unexpected announcement that Prigozhin was standing down in exchange for Lukashenko’s offer of safe passage to Belarus has boosted the diplomatic credentials of the Belarusian leader. His timely intervention appears to have saved not just Russia from descending into civil war, but also the whole world from unpredictable turmoil in a nuclear power.
Lukashenko is proudly sharing details of how he defused the situation with just a few phone calls. But if he thinks that Moscow, Kyiv, Washington, and Brussels will now reclassify him as a valuable partner and intermediary, he is set to be disappointed.
Even though Lukashenko featured prominently in the earlier efforts to resolve the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2015, nowadays the situation is very different. The West will certainly not be calling on the contested Belarusian leader’s negotiating skills with the Kremlin, given that he allowed Russian troops to invade Ukraine via his territory and is now abetting Moscow’s nuclear escalation by hosting Russian nuclear warheads.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, is not so much grateful to Lukashenko as it is resentful, due to the nature of the agreement. It’s advantageous for the Belarusian leader to present the arrangements between Prigozhin and the Kremlin as a critical deal between two powerful adversaries that only a skilled negotiator could have secured. But for the Kremlin, this take on events is unacceptable, because the very idea of a mediator appears to put Prigozhin on an equal footing with Putin.
For Moscow, Prigozhin is not an adversary, but a traitor. There can be no question of entering into a deal with such a person. It was at most an honorable surrender on the Wagner boss’s part—and may not remain honorable for long.
Putin has repeatedly and publicly accused Prigozhin of treason, and his feelings about perceived traitors have long been known. The president’s casual attitude to rules and agreements is no less well known. The armed insurrection criminal case against Wagner may have been dropped, but no promises were made not to open another case: on suspicion of embezzling state funds, for example.
As for Lukashenko, for the Kremlin, he is simply a useful contractor who agreed to do what no one in the Russian leadership wanted to. It’s hard to imagine Security Council head Nikolai Patrushev, Federal Security Service chief Alexander Bortnikov, or Chief of Staff Anton Vaino—never mind Putin himself—deigning to enter into direct public talks with Prigozhin.
It’s likely that the Kremlin considers it ample reward for Lukashenko’s services to simply allow him to keep boasting about his alleged achievements. There are no signals that the Russian leadership intends to coordinate any further actions with regard to Prigozhin or Wagner with Lukashenko.
The Belarusian leader may be promising that Wagner fighters are going to train the Belarusian army and so on, but that will be his problem if he fails to deliver. If he wants to portray himself as the influential guarantor of a crucial deal, no one in Moscow will stop him. But he will also have to deal with the consequences when it becomes clear that he cannot in fact guarantee anything or influence the fate of Wagner, since he is not the one making the decisions.
Just a few years ago, when Lukashenko organized the peace talks on resolving the conflict in the Donbas, the Belarusian leader hosted his counterparts from Germany, France, Russia, and Ukraine in Minsk. Now he is boasting of how he relayed the terms of surrender proposed by Putin to a rogue army commander because the Russian president felt it beneath him to do so himself.
Also, unlike the international peace talks, the negotiations between Lukashenko and Prigozhin solved a Russian domestic problem. In playing the role he did, the Belarusian leader has effectively joined the ranks of Russian grandees vying for Putin’s favor by eliminating irritating problems that could distract the president from his high-stakes geopolitical machinations.
These distractions include elections, budget issues, social welfare, and now Prigozhin’s mutiny. The Belarusian president showed himself to be far more effective in dealing with this particular issue than heavyweights such as Bortnikov or Vaino. Lukashenko’s success will undoubtedly boost his standing with Putin, influence within the system, connections, and so on. But these are all only significant within Russia—or, given the apparent movability of Russia’s borders, the “Russian world.”
In that world, Igor Sechin has the Rosneft oil major, Ramzan Kadyrov has the Chechen republic, Prigozhin until recently had the Wagner private military company, and Lukashenko has a small country internationally recognized as a sovereign nation. That’s not a bad asset to have, and more than enough to be able to vie for influence within the Russian elite.
From the outside, this move from a European president to a “Russian world” grandee might seem like a demotion, but it’s all subjective—and may well be what Lukashenko himself wanted. The collective farm manager-turned-dictator has never been comfortable interacting with the West. The European mentality is alien to him, and the considerable advantages of cooperating with the West were always clouded by the fear that people would take advantage of him—an outsider—at any opportunity.
Lukashenko is far more at home within Russia’s corridors of power, where he knows exactly how things work and how to get the desired results. Sure, those corridors are fraught with their own intrigues and deception, but for the aging Belarusian leader, it’s better the devil you know.
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