A22 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 , 2020
BY ISABELLE KHURSHUDYANmoscow — As Belarusian state
television aired footage of the ar-
rests of 33 suspected Russian mer-
cenaries near Minsk, the anchor
explained why the men raised sus-
picions: They weren’t drinking al-
cohol or visiting entertainment
spots and wore plain military-
style clothing.
In other words, the report said,
it was “behavior atypical of Rus-
sian tourists.”
The detentions on Wednesday
have expanded an unusual run of
tension between Belarus and Rus-
sia, once tight allies that have
drifted apart as Belarus’s presi-
dent, Alexander Lukashenko,
tests policies independent of Mos-
cow’s backing.
The rare friction with Russia is
now part of the backdrop for an
Aug. 9 election that is expected to
extend Lukashenko’s 26-year au-
thoritarian grip on power.
But Lukashenko also appears to
be using the showdown with Mos-
cow to bolster his populist creden-
tials and to try to discredit opposi-
tion candidate Svetlana Tikha-
novskaya, a newcomer who has
led a surprisingly strong cam-
paign.
Belarus claims — without mak-
ing any evidence public — that the
alleged mercenaries are part of
Russia’s shadowy Wagner Group
paramilitary outfit and were sent
to Minsk to destabilize the coun-
try ahead of presidential elections.
Analysts have expressed doubts
about Belarus’s claim. It’s moreplausible, they say, that Minsk was
just being used as a transit corri-
dor. Lukashenko’s critics have por-
trayed his allegations as a ploy for
personal political gain.Belarus’s Investigative Com-
mittee linked the detained Rus-
sians to Tikhanovskaya’s hus-
band, a jailed opposition blogger,
as part of a criminal investigationinto alleged preparations for stag-
ing “mass riots.”
“Goodness me, what revolu-
tion? We want honest elections,”
Tikhanovskaya said at a Minsk
campaign event on Thursday
night that drew an estimated
crowd of more than 60,000, be-
lieved to be the largest political
rally in Belarus since 1991.
“No one will believe that these
militants were dispatched to us in
time for the election,” she added.
Wagner has been tied to Rus-
sian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin,
a close ally of President Vladimir
Putin, and its mercenaries have
fought in armed conflicts to ad-
vance Russian interests in eastern
Ukraine, Syria, Libya and else-
where. The Kremlin officially de-
nies any connection to Wagner.
Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman
for Putin, said the men were in
Belarus as a stopover to Istanbul
because commercial flights out of
Russia remain limited due to coro-
navirus restrictions.
“The unfounded detention of
Russian citizens, 33 citizens, does
not fully fit within the parameters
of allied relations, that’s for sure,”
Peskov said, adding that the
Kremlin expects the men to be
released “in the near future.”
As Russia intensified its push
last year to form a unified state
with Belarus — and Lukashenko
resisted — a rift developed be-tween the two countries.
Moscow responded by threat-
ening Minsk’s discounted deal on
oil, so Lukashenko sought out a
supply elsewhere in an effort to
become less reliant on his Russian
counterparts. Now confronted
with a rejuvenated opposition
movement, he’s repeatedly at-
tempted to deflect domestic un-
rest onto foreign meddling — by
Russia, in particular.
Artyom Shraibman of Sense
Analytics, a Minsk-based political
consultancy, said this incident
demonstrates a further “erosion of
trust” because collaboration be-
tween the countries’ security
agencies “was considered the sa-
cred cow of the union.”
“Russia and Belarus could ar-
gue about economics, oil and gas,
but cooperation between intelli-
gence services was always seem-
ingly perfect,” he added.
If the Russians were indeed just
traveling through Belarus and
didn’t warn Belarusian authori-
ties, it’s “an unprofessional lapse
in communication” on Moscow’s
part, Shraibman said, but if Minsk
was aware and arrested the men
anyway, “that’s next-level chal-
lenging to Belarusian-Russian re-
lations.”
“Now it all depends on how
much restraint the sides will
show,” he said.
[email protected]Belarus claims mercenaries from Russia sought to disrupt voting
TATYANA ZENKOVICH/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
People attend a campaign rally for Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in Minsk, Belarus. The presidential
opposition candidate is challenging the 26-year rule of Alexander Lukashenko in an Aug. 9 election.BY KAREN DEYOUNGThe public dissonance be-
tween President Trump and his
top national security team over
Russia reached new heights in the
past week.
Asked on Tuesday if he had
mentioned reports of Russian-
paid bounties for killing U.S.
troops in Afghanistan to Presi-
dent Vladimir Putin during any of
the several phone calls they have
had since the charge emerged,
Trump said no. It was “fake news,”
he said. “I have never discussed it
with him.”
“They always bring up Russia,
Russia, Russia,” Trump com-
plained in the interview with Ax-
ios.
On Wednesday, as Defense Sec-
retary Mark T. Esper and military
leaders announced plans to with-
draw 12,000 troops from Ger-
many to better position the NATO
alliance for “deterrence of Rus-
sia,” Trump offered a different
explanation.
It was all about payback
against NATO ally Germany for
years of ripping off the United
States on defense and trade, he
told reporters at the White House.
“Why would we keep all of our
troops there?” He made no men-
tion of Russia.
On Thursday, Democratic law-
makers at a Senate hearing ques-
tioned Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo over the president’s dis-
missal of the bounty report, the
troop withdrawal, and the cutting
of a European defense initiative
budget.
In response, Pompeo boasted
of U.S. lethal weapons shipped to
Ukraine, sanctions against “more
than 360 Russian targets,” a 2018
U.S. strike against attacking Rus-
sian mercenaries in Syria that
killed hundreds, and a doubling
of proposed funds to counter
Kremlin disinformation cam-
paigns.
“We’re the toughest adminis-
tration ever on Russia,” he said.
Despite the tough talk from
those below him, Trump has been
accused of being soft on Russia,
and particularly on Putin, since
he began his first presidential
campaign. He’s an “absolute lead-
er,” Trump said of the Russian in a
2015 tweet, “so highly respected
within his own country and be-
yond.”
The compliment was among
many that would follow during
Trump’s candidacy and presiden-
cy — on Twitter, in interviews, and
standing by Putin’s side in a news
conference after their 2018 one-
on-one meeting in Helsinki. It
was there that Trump sided with
Putin’s denials against U.S. intelli-
gence conclusions that Russia in-
terfered in the 2016 presidential
election.
Those who think there is stra-
tegic thought behind Trump’s
praise of Putin are missing the
point, said a former senior admin-
istration official. “They’re think-
ing about a conventional politi-
cian who cares about U.S. foreign
policy” and has a historical
knowledge and understanding of
the U.S.-Russia relationship, said
the former official, who spoke onthe condition of anonymity to
offer a candid assessment.
Trump “doesn’t want to be
kicked around by the Russians,”
but he does want to “cozy up to
Putin,” the former official said. “If
Russia didn’t exist, and Putin was
the badass leader of — pick a
country — [Trump] would still
want to be seen with him.”
To the extent Trump “under-
mines U.S. policy,” it is not neces-
sarily because of his lauding ofPutin, but “because there is no
coherent policy,” the former offi-
cial said. “There is no devolution
to fill out the details of the kind of
deals he wants to make.” The
result is what is widely seen
among experts as tactical re-
sponses to Russian actions. Many
of those responses, from sanc-
tions to combating disinforma-
tion, have been initiated or pro-
moted by Congress, which often
finds bipartisan agreement on
Kremlin perfidy.
Trump’s sometimes fawning
esteem for the Russian leader has
made even some of Trump’s con-
servative supporters uneasy. But
there is widespread support
among them for the president’sinsistence that investigations of
the Kremlin’s efforts to skew the
U.S. electoral process — and the
possible involvement of the
Trump campaign — was political-
ly motivated by the Obama ad-
ministration to elect Democratic
candidate Hillary Clinton and ul-
timately by efforts to undermine
the legitimacy of Trump’s presi-
dency.
Democrats and the “main-
stream media” have focused on
Trump’s reluctance to criticize
Putin, while ignoring “a broader
strategy of being tough with Rus-
sia” that does not “fit the narra-
tive,” Marc Thiessen, a former
speechwriter for President
George W. Bush, now a fellow at
the American Enterprise Insti-
tute, a Fox News contributor and
columnist for The Washington
Post, said in a mid-July AEI pod-
cast.
In addition to the sanctions
and other measures, Thiessen
pointed to Trump’s approval of a
U.S. cyberattack that shut down a
group of Kremlin-backed trolls on
the day of the 2018 midterm elec-
tions. While the classified attack
was reported by The Post last
year, Trump acknowledged for
the first time that it had hap-
pened and he had launched it, in
an interview with Thiessen last
month.
“I made us the number one
oil-producing country in the
world,” rebuilt the U.S. military to
make it the “newest... we’ve ever
had,” pressed NATO members to
spend more on defense and pres-
sured Germany to cancel a natu-ral gas pipeline from Russia, none
of which, Trump said, was “good
for Russia.”
But even though “every week,
we put more sanctions on Russia,”
Trump said, he and Putin “actual-
ly have a very good relationship.”
As an example, Trump cited what
he said were their efforts “to work
out a nuclear arms treaty that’s
going to be a significant one.”
So far, however, there has been
no progress toward rewriting or
extending the most significant
arms accord between them, the
New START nuclear arms reduc-
tion treaty that expires in Febru-
ary. A recent exploratory meeting
between the two sides in Vienna
ended without result after the
administration, which has turned
much of its foreign policy aggres-
sion toward China in this election
year, insisted that its far smaller
nuclear arsenal be included. Both
Beijing and Moscow refused.
“From the Russian standpoint,
we’re not serious about arms con-
trol at this point,” said Thomas
Graham, who managed a White
House-Kremlin strategic dia-
logue as senior director for Russia
on the National Security Council
under Bush. “There is simply not
time now to negotiate a new
agreement, bilateral, let alone tri-
lateral.”
“Other than the Russians capit-
ulating, I have no idea what the
[Trump] administration is trying
to achieve concerning Russia,”
Graham said.
Trump’s personal diplomacy is
credited with facilitating oil pro-
duction cuts last spring by Russia,Saudi Arabia and Mexico as prices
plummeted and they — along
with the United States — were
facing a supply glut as the spread
of the coronavirus reduced de-
mand.
But judging by Trump’s own
statements, both the European
troop withdrawals and sanctions
on companies working on the
Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Rus-
sia have far more to do with
punishing Germany, a frequent
target of Trump’s public and pri-
vate ire, than being part of a
comprehensive Russia strategy.
Graham, the former NSC Rus-
sia director, thinks that Trump’s
rejection of the bounty charge —
in which Russia military intelli-
gence reportedly paid Taliban-
linked militants to kill U.S. troops
— is a less than pertinent example
of the president’s reluctance to
confront the Russian leader.
“I worked for a president who
didn’t like to deliver bad news to
Putin,” he said. “But you can also
make the argument that unless
it’s been thoroughly raised at low-
er levels, it doesn’t make any
sense to raise it at a higher level.
All you’re going to do is get a
denial from Putin.”
“Ultimately our goal is to shift
Russian behavior in a way that is
much more favorable to advance
our national interest,” Graham
said. “Has anything that the ad-
ministration has done...
changed Russian behavior in any
way favorable to the United
States? I’d be hard put to say that
it has.”
[email protected]Lack of strategic approach to Moscow is lost in din of Trump, aides
“We’re the toughest
administration ever
o n Russia.”
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