Why is Belarus dominated by Russia?

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This is the script for my video posted on May 12, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

Belarus is more than just a Russian ally. As of 2026, it is effectively a Russian satellite state. In fact, Russia controls or routes roughly 90% of Belarusian exports, leverages Belarusian airspace and territory for military operations, dominates the Belarusian economy via fused regulatory and financial environments, and hosts tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian soil. If Vladimir Putin hadn’t intervened during Belarus’s mass protests in 2020, Aleksandr Lukashenko’s regime likely would have collapsed. So how exactly did Belarus become subjugated by Russia?

The story starts way back in the 10th century CE, when Belarusian lands were part of the East Slavic state called Kievan Rus, along with much of modern Ukraine and western Russia. The principalities comprising Kievan Rus were semi-autonomous, but today the Russian government pushes the narrative that these three countries are historically the same.

When the Mongols invaded in the 13th century, Kievan Rus was shattered. Belarusian lands largely escaped Mongol devastation and were gradually absorbed into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania between the 13th and 14th centuries. The people there adopted the Ruthenian language, which is considered a precursor to the modern Belarusian and Ukrainian languages. Democratic opposition in Belarus today cites this period as an anchor point for the country’s non-Russian identity, and the Lukashenko regime actively suppresses this narrative.

In 1795, after over 200 years as a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and over 400 years in that political sphere of influence, all Belarusian lands were brought into the Russian Empire through the three Partitions of Poland. Uprisings were crushed throughout the 19th century, and these were followed by systematic Russification. Printing in the Belarusian language was outlawed during the 19th century, the Belarusian Catholic Uniate church was suppressed in favor of Russian Orthodox, and the nobility in Belarus was slowly displaced by Russian elites. By 1897, fewer than 10% of inhabitants of Belarusians in towns larger than 50000 people declared Belarusian as their language.

But WWII was the country’s single most formative experience. About 1 in 5 Belarusians died during the war, including between 500k and 800k Jews. Over 5000 villages were destroyed by Germany. The memory of WWII became the load-bearing element of Soviet Belarusian identity, and after the war, urbanization brought trainloads of Belarusian immigrants into Russian cities. By the late 20th century, the Russian language dominated education, media, and politics in Belarus, with Belarusian surviving mostly in rural and intellectual circles.

Unlike the Baltics, Ukraine, or even Moldova, Belarus did not have a strong independence movement after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The 1994 election was Belarus’s first and last actually competitive presidential vote, and Aleksandr Lukashenko has been in power ever since. I highly recommend watching my previous video on Lukashenko if you want more information. But suffice it to say that under Lukashenko, Belarus made Russian a co-official language and pushed the country to stay economically close to Russia.

Interestingly, in the mid to late 90s, Belarus and Russia signed several treaties that collectively envisioned a union state with a single market, shared currency, common defense, and joint legislative bodies. It was mostly a declarative framework, as most integration provisions were never implemented. Lukashenko negotiated the agreement with Russian president Boris Yeltsin, and he likely assumed that Yeltsin would die first and he’d become the leader of this Slavic union by default. When Putin rose to power in 2000, that calculation changed and Lukashenko began actively stalling deeper integration between the two countries because he wanted to dominate rather than be dominated.

Of course, in 2018, then Russian PM Dmitri Medvedev publicly proposed further integration under the 1999 treaty, and negotiations began. The 2020 election crisis I mentioned earlier heavily weakened Lukashenko’s authority and foundationally threatened his regime, and it was Putin’s intervention that ultimately forced Lukashenko to change his mind. In November 2021, Lukashenko and Putin signed 28 programs for a Union State, including details on taxation, customs, financial markets, energy, industry, transport, and more. They explicitly excluded a single currency and any kind of supranational authority at Belarus’s insistence, but these agreements effectively made Belarus a client state of Russia. From the perspective of the Russian government, they had finally reunited two of the three parts of Kievan Rus.

In February 2022, Belarus directly supported Russia in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, though Belarusian troops stayed out of combat due to their small size and Lukashenko’s need to maintain domestic legitimacy by preventing direct involvement in Russian aggression, among other reasons. Three days after the invasion began, a long-scheduled referendum removed Belarus’s constitutional commitment to remain free of nuclear weapons. Since then, Belarus and Russia have only grown closer, and by that I mean that Belarus has largely folded into Russia’s control. In January 2024, Putin and Lukashenko signed a new development plan with hundreds of new joint projects. Belarus claimed that most of the 28 union programs were complete, but Russia continued to revise them in their favor. And practically all of these lead to stronger Russian influence over the country in one way or another, even as Lukashenko refuses to commit troops to Ukraine or recognize Russian annexations.

So why hasn’t a full political union actually taken place by now? Well, the short answer is that Lukashenko doesn’t want to become a Russian governor. Putin also does not need the legal and geopolitical mess of official annexation when he already has control. And those union programs allow Russia to absorb Belarus economically without the political cost. In practice, this means that effectively all aspects of Belarus’s economy directly depend on decisions made by Russian economic authorities, with the Belarusian ruble now fluctuating in sync with the Russian ruble.

Of course, Lukashenko has had visibly declining health. Lukashenko’s current term, if you can really call it that, runs until 2030, and he has stated publicly that he’s not planning to stay in office. As much as we should be skeptical of that, the reality is that change is inevitable, and there’s no telling what would happen if Lukashenko died. Russia would likely intervene to stay in control, but despite crackdowns and arrests, the spirit of the democratic movement in Belarus is strong, as evidenced in the 2020 mass protests. No matter what, the fates of both countries are irrevocably intertwined.

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