Russian-Belarusian Relations: Ultimate dependence
Valeria Kostyugova, Anatoly Pankovsky

Summary

The year 2010 saw more conflicts between Russia and Belarus than any other year in the history of mutual relations as independent nations. The year traditionally started with a conflict – this time over crude oil supplies – and ended in cold uncertainty: Russia de-facto recognized Lukashenko’s authority as president, but disappointed his expectations of both cheap oil supplies and large-scale political support.
The information campaign of Russian television channels and other media targeted against Alexander Lukashenko in the second half of the year was unprecedented: the Belarusian regime had never before undergone such an intensive external media pressure. Meanwhile, the December 19 events brought to naught Minsk’s efforts to pursue autonomous policies internationally and regionally (this trend had been observed in the past few years); as a result, Minsk appeared to stay, willy-nilly, with the only political ally, Russia. The country’s track record of the past decade proves that the dialogue with the East has been as dramatic as the dialogue with the West.

Tendencies:

• Progressive increase in prices of Russian natural gas and crude oil supplied to Belarus towards regional tariffs;
• Integration of the trade area of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, unification of rules within that area;
• Destruction of Lukashenko’s reputation in the Russian media space.

In 2010, three factors shaped the pattern for development of Russian-Belarusian relations. The first one was the election campaign in Belarus and the presidential campaign in Russia, which marked its start in 2010. The second factor is connected with the new trend for identifying the chief parameters of energy trade in the framework of the decreasing significance of Belarusian transit. The country is therefore prompted to seek alternative suppliers of energy, including Venezuelan and Caspian oil. The third factor is the establishment of the common trade area – the Common Economic Area (CEA) incorporating customs territories of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus. However, the jack-in-the-box grand finale of the year was as far from being a summary of all trends observed in the first eleven months as it could be. The brutality of law enforcement bodies on December 19 made the task of preserving social and economic stability virtually impossible, whereas the Russian administration was faced with a new complicated yet exciting challenge to use the opportunities that all of a sudden occurred in Belarus.

Media dialogue with Russia: Krestny Batka

Media conflicts between Russia and Belarus have not been infrequent in the past decade (they were quite rare during the Yeltsin era, though) and were traditionally accompanied with all sorts of trade wars, specifically oil and gas spats. Therefore, the full-scale media war of 2010 was definitely a new phenomenon characterizing Russian-Belarusian relations.
Krestny Batka (a blend of “godfather” and “nation’s chief”, a.k.a. “god-batka”) is a four-episode documentary severely criticizing the Belarusian president. Russian NTV television channel aired the four episodes in its Emergency show between July 4 and October 81 . Besides the notorious documentaries, the Russian print media published a series of articles that displeased the Belarusian president (as did many news reports and analytical television programs). Finally, in his personal blog Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called on his Belarusian counterpart to investigate into the cases of missing opponents of the Belarusian regime, a move that received broad publicity. 
The media attack was so violent that many in Belarus (including experts and even Alexander Lukashenko himself) concluded that the Russian administration was going to remove Lukashenko from his office. The Belarusian president very emotionally shared this news at a meeting with Russian journalists on October 1. According to him, the media warfare targeting him was part of a large-scale conspiracy masterminded by Medvedev and Putin. The list of their victims already included many political heavyweights – cast-off rulers of Tatarstan, Bashkiria and Kalmykia – Mentimir Shaymiev, Murtaza Rakhimov and Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, respectively, as well as former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov2 .
We have to admit that Lukashenko’s words were not politically senseless, since Medvedev and Putin should be eager to neutralize potent political personalities on the eve of a new election cycle in Russia. It is another matter that the media campaign that in this way or another accompanies each election cycle targets Russian consumers rather than the Belarusian audience. In this context, Lukashenko’s suspicions (expressed during the same October 1 press availability) that the Kremlin was financing the Belarusian opposition are hardly valid.
To kick out some significant political persons, such as Yury Luzhkov, was only a part of the “conspiracy”, because its “main course” envisaged a neutralization of harmful (as the Medvedev-Putin tandem saw it) ideas, including the Belarusian “miracle”, a posthumous edition of socialism. Ironically, while trying to become an internal factor of Russian politics, Alexander Lukashenko indeed became such a factor, but his true role appeared to be quite different from what he had originally expected. The Russian ruling elite now needs to neutralize this factor, needs to discredit the fetish that Alexander Lukashenko has turned into. Therefore, as content analysis shows, the described media campaign as a whole and Krestny Batka documentaries as its part include the following clear messages to Russian voters:

• Alexander Lukashenko is a not a political ally of Russia; he ignores integration initiatives of Russia and makes arrangements with its enemies, such as Boris Berezovsky, Mikheil Saakashvili, etc.
• The mediocre economic policy pursued by Lukashenko costs Russia too much, because the Belarusian “socially-oriented” state” can exist only at the expense of Russian taxpayers (“Russians feed Lukashenko”). Lukashenko will not share this money with Belarusians (the topics of corruption, clanship and old boy networks);
• Lukashenko is not the real choice of the Belarusian nation, because he rigs elections and eliminates political opponents, therefore, relations with Lukashenko and relations with Belarusians are two different layers of relations.

The media campaign is therefore aimed at, firstly, legitimization of the disintegration trends observed in the past few years, which some Postsoveticum leaders are blamed for. The message is addressed to advocates of “grand Russia”, or the USSR3 .
Secondly, the campaign was designed to discredit socialist ideas, supported by an estimated 40% of Russians (President Lukashenko is perceived as a personified fetish of contemporary socialism). Thirdly, the media warfare neutralizes unwanted top-ranking figures of the Russian political field.
Public opinion polls showed that Krestny Batka documentaries managed to slash Lukashenko’s sympathy rating to 5% (from 30% previously). A preliminary conclusion that can be drawn here is that the propaganda campaign was a success. As for Lukashenko himself, there are good reasons to believe that the Medvedev-Putin tandem had not set itself the more ambitious task of unseating the Belarusian president.

Problem of oil supplies and Customs Union

The year 2010 started traditionally, with a conflict over terms of Russian crude oil supplies to Belarus. The original agreement was inked in early 2007 and stipulated deliveries within three years to come, therefore, the Russian side believed oil trade with Belarus should follow the usual procedure starting 2010, that is, subject to a 100% export duty. The Belarusian side had hopes that starting early 2010 all oil deliveries would be in accordance with the rules effective prior to the 2007 deal, that is, cheap and without any duties.
The two countries haggled the entire month of January, and on January 27, First Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Semashko and Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin reached a compromise on the terms of trade in Russian crude oil. Russia imposed a 100% export duty on the entire volume of deliveries to Belarus except for 6.3 million metric tons meant for domestic consumption. The new framework automatically meant a serious reduction in Belarusian oil sector margins, and since “oil” has always been a benchmark for the Belarusian economy, the duty introduced in Moscow was regarded as a threat to the economic security of the country. On the day the agreement was signed, Vladimir Semashko said: “The agreement as we sign it today cannot last long.” The Belarusian side therefore redoubled efforts to look for alternative sources of oil and oil products, and sought to make Russia resume oil supplies on previous easy terms. Those efforts proved to be fruitful: firstly, Minsk managed to agree on Venezuelan oil supplies, procuring an additional bargaining chip in talks with Russia. Secondly, Belarus contrived to launch oil transport via Ukraine by Odessa-Brody oil pipeline, which brought into action the project to transit Caspian oil to the EU by the pipeline system of Eastern European states (for details, see: V. Dunaev Regional Integration in Eastern Europe, Belarusian Yearbook-2010). Finally, Russia undertook to abolish oil export duties in the Customs Union and the Common Economic Area. For this matter, oil became the carrot that Russia used quite efficiently (despite the clearly unfriendly tone of Russian-Belarusian relations) to draw Belarus into the Customs Union and the CEA, that is into an integrated trade and political project implemented mostly on Russian terms, including the unification of motorcar duties, sanitary norms, and the use of safeguards, antidumping and countervailing measures). On November 19, the premiers of the three CEA member-states – Russia (Vladimir Putin), Belarus (Sergey Sidorsky) and Kazakhstan (Karim Massimov) inked a number of documents from the package of deals to form the CEA4 .
Finally, ten days prior to the presidential election in Belarus, on December 9, 2010, Lukashenko, Medvedev and Nazarbayev in Moscow signed a package of seventeen agreements to form the regulatory framework of the Common Economic Area (CEA)5 . The package included the foreign trade agreement, veterinary and sanitary control agreements, indirect tax collection agreement, customs statistics agreement, etc.6 For its part, Russia promised to supply oil to Belarus without applying export duties starting January 1, 2011. Importantly, Belarus had taken the entire year to negotiate the Customs Union and CEA documents and haggled over each provision. The key condition laid down by the Belarusian side was the supply of cheap duty-free crude oil. After December 9, Minsk took just a couple of weeks to hastily ratify the whole package. Did Russia hold up its end of the deal? Formally, it did; but de facto it did not, because oil turned out to be much costlier than Belarus had expected. Crude oil has indeed been supplied to Belarus on a duty-free basis since January 1, 2011, but Russian traditional oil suppliers have been uninterested in further deliveries to Belarus.

Gas supplies: end of easy gas

“Natural gas” has been a media favorite for years, and external observers could easily believe Russian-Belarusian relations were reduced to supplies and transit of natural gas, exclusively provided by OAO Gazprom. However, in 2010 natural gas took a backseat to more important issues, even though Gazprom suspended deliveries to Belarus in June to make Belarusian partners pay up. Gas therefore was moved into the “technical issues” category from “political issues”. The issue had gained momentum in previous years, and the Belarusian side could not stop negotiating easier gas trade terms overnight – it continued bargaining over gas supplies in a package with oil issues, separately or just for the sake of bargaining. The Russian side firmly kept to the “contractual price” line, though.
As of the beginning of 2011, Belarus still enjoyed relatively preferential natural gas import terms and paid less than its neighbors (less than USD 300 per 1,000 cubic meters); however, the price keeps moving inexorably towards the regional level. Gazprom has therefore managed to teach Minsk some financial discipline and make the Belarusian gas market profitable.

Conclusion

In 2011, Belarus found itself critically dependent on what proved to be its single significant ally, despite its enormous efforts to diversify its foreign and domestic policies, as well as energy supplies. This result was not predetermined by the tendencies observed throughout the year, though. On the contrary, the events of December 19 nullified many of them, including the efforts Belarus had been making for months, for instance, its painstaking campaign to improve its contacts with the West. Finding itself in isolation (which was the price of Lukashenko’s “success” at the presidential election), Belarus lost many of its bargaining chips in negotiations with Russia. As a result, it was dragged into the Customs Union and the CEA without adequate compensations, say, cheap natural gas and oil. Furthermore, being faced with the crisis, Belarus critically depends on Russian loans. There used to be a heavy dependence on Russian energy supplies and Russian outlets before 2010, but the two countries were interdependent, because Russia to a great extent needed Belarusian transit services. In 2011, that need is not as dramatic as it used to be, whereas Belarus is in a much more complicated situation than ever before.
Official Minsk is not just on unfriendly terms with Europe – it deceived European partners, which is a totally different thing. In this context, the tactics of wavering between the East and the West are not efficient anymore, and the Kremlin is perfectly aware of this. It is in the Kremlin that the main shareholders of the Belarusian regime reside, and it is on the next election cycle in Russia that the Belarusian regime ultimately depends.