Support for Putin does not serve Belarusians

Miodrag Vlahovic, former Montenegrin ambassador to the Holy See and now president of the Montenegro Helsinki Committee, writes:

Alexander Lukashenko struggled to contain his anger as he gesticulated wildly at Vladimir Putin.

At a summit in the Black Sea city of Sochi last month, the tyrant of Belarus publicly reassured the tyrant of Russia not to worry about the hundreds of thousands of Russians who have fled the country since the Kremlin imposed partial conscription on its people.

What Belarus has lost

Lukashenko has some experience in this matter. He lost – and then stole – the election in his own country in 2020. Since then, Belarus has experienced significant brain drain, with thousands of Belarusian companies setting up shop in neighboring European countries.

“Alright 30,000, 50,000 (Russians) have fled,” Lukashenko advised Putin. “Let them leave. I do not know what you think about it, but I was not particularly worried when a few thousand left in 2020. They asked to go back, most of them want to go back. And these people are coming back.”

Unfortunately for the Belarusian economy and its remaining residents, this is not true.

Since Lukashenko ordered his secret police to overturn the peoples’ electoral will, more than 4,000 Belarusian small and medium sized businesses have relocated. They have gone mainly to countries inside the European Union, notably Poland. Many more have simply disappeared.

The details are dramatic

The crackdown has had a devastating effect on business confidence and inward investment. Leading Belarusian businessmen took fright, particularly those involved in the Hi-Tech Park (HTP). It was once one of the leading innovative technology clusters in Central and Eastern Europe.

For years, there was an unspoken contract between the Belarusian regime and an IT sector that funded so much of the country’s growth. We do not touch you, and you do not meddle in politics. The stolen 2020 election has disintegrated that tacit agreement.

Viktor Prokopenya, a Belarus-born fintech entrepreneur, criticized the assaults on democratic protestors. He then moved currency.com, a global web and app based trading platform that disrupted traditional finance, out of the country. Viktor Kisly, the billionaire chief executive of Wargaming, the company behind the popular online game World of Tanks; Arkady Dobkin, the owner of EPAM;  Mikhail Chuprinsky, founder of robot manufacturer Rozum Robotics; and Mikita Mikado, CEO of PandaDoc, which provides document automation software, quickly followed.

The damage will be longterm

I know the damage that an exodus of humans and capital can do to a country’s prospects. I was foreign minister of Montenegro when it re-gained its independence in 2006, later becoming our first ambassador to the United States.

By the time we gained independence, the bitter Balkans War of the 1990s had wrought a devastating toll on the economies of south-eastern Europe, Montenegro included.

Figures from the World Bank suggest we lost around 12% of our population. Many of the emigrants were highly-educated managers, professionals, scientists, researchers, and technicians, together with young people striving for better training, education, careers and living prospects.

Montenegro is still feeling the effects today. The “brain drain” has undermined local democracy and social cohesion. Unemployment is around 15% – more than twice as high as the EU average.

This year’s Russian aggression on Ukraine and the effects of Western sanctions on Belarus – Russia’s key ally – have made Lukashenko’s reassurance to Putin in Sochi even more dubious.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February, the outflow of businesses and entrepreneurs from Belarus has grown rapidly. In June alone, the number of newly registered businesses in Poland backed with Belarusian capital amounted to 254 companies. Last month, Polish president Andrzej Duda said that 150,000 Belarusians have received asylum and work in Poland, including thousands of protesters.

Back in Belarus, it is estimated that up to 80% of the vital IT industry will disappear. According to experts, this will cause a 4% drop in GDP. 

If Lukashenko continues to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine then Belarus will continue to suffer gravely. The president of Germany’s digital association Bitkom recently admitted: “By bringing IT specialists from Russia and Belarus to us, the aggressor will be noticeably weakened.”

Ominous signs

The latest signs are ominous. In recent days, Lukashenko has said that Belarus and Russia are to deploy a joint military group and that thousands of Russian troops will be arriving in his country for drills.

It is extremely unlike the tyrant of Minsk will reconsider, opt for peace and start making decisions that support the citizens of his own country – and not Putin and Russian aggression on Ukraine.