Lukashenko’s Lost Cause

The attempt by Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko to fight a hike in the price of natural gas from Russia has German newspapers predicting a quick end to his resistance — or his country’s independence.

When Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko slapped a transit duty on Russian oil crossing his country to the west, he knew he was picking a fight with the biggest bully on the schoolyard. But he may not have realized that it would be seen — at least in Germany — as the last stand of a desperate dictator.

Lukashenko’s move was a brash answer to Moscow’s doubling of natural-gas prices on Jan. 1. Russia has been trying to wean its former Soviet satellite nations from cheap natural gas and oil, energy which Russia claims is “subsidized.” However its methods have been thuggish and nakedly political, as when Russian Gazprom shut off its supply of natural gas to Ukraine on New Year’s Eve 2005 after the smaller nation refused to pay a steep price increase.

Lukashenko knows Moscow needs pipelines across Belarus to reach lucrative energy markets in western Europe, so he decided to jack up the price of transit. “If they are drowning in petrodollars and other currency income (in Moscow) and have decided … to place us in conditions worse even than Germany and other European countries, then let’s ask this rich Russia to pay us for our services,” an angry Lukashenko said on TV this week.

Spiegel