IS PRESIDENT PUTIN PREPARING TO ANNEX BELARUS?

The free world was alarmed in April this year when Putin made global headlines by announcing an agreement with Minsk to station Russian tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory.

- JOHN DOBSON

When a leading politician and former spy dies in mysterious circumstances, friends and colleagues are bound to be worried. So it was last November, when Vladimir Makei, Belarus’s foreign minister “passed away suddenly”, according to Belarusian media, amid claims that he was in secret contact with the West over the war in Ukraine and was preventing President Vladimir Putin from incorporating Belarus into Russia. Friends confirmed that the 64-year-old Makei had looked perfectly healthy in the days leading up to his “heart attack” and was not known to be suffering from any chronic illness. His death occurred days before he was due to attend an Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe meeting in the city of Lodz to meet key Western politicians and officials—a session from which Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was banned. Following the meeting in Poland, Makei was due to have a scheduled meeting with Lavrov, amid Russian suspicions over his back channel liaising with Western interlocutors.

Such was the concern in Minsk of the death of the second most important man in Belarus, that the country’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, ordered the replacement of his cooks, servants and guards, for fear of assassination. Lukashenko’s children were given extra security. As one close associate is alleged to have said, Lukashenko fears his supposed ally is arranging “a magnificent funeral” for him. Lukashenko knows full well Russia’s known ability to poison a man so that everyone thinks that he’s died of natural causes.