Belarus’ democratic forces fail to align messaging on EU sanctions

Belarus faced the first EU sanctions almost 30 years ago, however, it seems this was not enough for all the involved parties to build an effective information policy regarding the sanctions.

The country-specific sanctions are a contradictory mechanism by nature.

While they allow the EU countries to demonstrate their attitude to adverse events and practices, such as human rights violations in other countries, in a non-military and relatively peaceful manner, they can have a strong negative impact on the population of targeted countries and low effectiveness when it comes to their goals.

Belarus is the perfect example of this controversy.

No matter how many packages of sanctions were implemented by the EU because of the human rights and political situation in Belarus, no matter how significant these sanctions were, the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, is still alive and well.

At the same time, Belarusians, who are the final recipients of sanctions, have to face movement restrictions and a decrease in already low incomes, due to the sanctions and constant political repressions.

In addition, three main players on the sanctions front – the European Union, the government of Belarus, and Belarusian democratic forces – create different narratives about the sanctions and their application.

While these narratives, in addition to generic political slogans and statements, include unintentional and deliberate misinformation, the general situation can be described as lacking clear, precise, and unbiased information for the ones who are impacted the most – Belarusians.

Thus, some representatives of Belarusian authorities and their state-controlled media try to promote the principle that “the sanctions will make us stronger”.

The sanctions are positioned as a window of opportunity for occupying the free niches that emerge when foreign companies leave the Belarusian market, although their departure obviously means job losses and a decrease in investments.

At the same time, in 2021, Lukashenko signed a law which foresees imprisonment from six to 12 years for those who call for sanctions against Belarus, its citizens, and organisations.

Besides, it is worth noting that the sanctions have a side effect important for the Belarusian authorities in their information manipulation tactics: They help to explain away economic failures and low incomes in the country while ignoring the real reasons primarily related to ineffective governance.

While official Minsk darts from one side to another, Belarusian democratic forces also fail to send a joint message to its supporters, running two opposing information campaigns.

Thus, the Office of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the presidential candidate of Belarus in 2020 and leader of a modern Belarusian democratic movement, actively calls for political and economic sanctions against Belarus, considering them an important tool to put pressure on Lukashenko’s regime, stop repressions, and free political prisoners.

Despite the clear intentions to make positive changes in Belarus and save its repressed people, the strengthening of sanctions did not help to get closer to those goals. However, the Office continues to convince Belarusians of the effectiveness of this mechanism, which does not seem to be aligned with the facts.

At the same time, another wing of Belarusian opposition, Zianon Pazniak and his Conservative Christian Party, strongly criticises the EU economic sanctions as they pushed Lukashenko to build closer relationships with Russia and put Belarus’s sovereignty in danger.

Additionally, he claims the Belarusian democratic forces which call for sanctions are KGB (Belarusian security public body) agents, without providing any evidence to corroborate such claims.

While it is normal that representatives of the Belarusian democratic movement may have different opinions on sanctions, the elements of misinformation in their statements make it even harder for an average Belarusian to get a clear picture of the EU sanctions and their consequences.

Finally, it could be expected that the EU, as the initiator, developer, and implementer of the sanctions, should be the one to stay away from ambiguities and controversies. Nevertheless, there is a certain difference in how the EU positions the sanctions and how they apply.

Since August 2020, when mass protests against rigged presidential elections took place in Belarus, the EU has imposed several sanction packages against the country.

Although in every related statement, the EU refers to human rights violations and repressions against Belarusians, the strongest sanctions relate not to them but to other actions of the Belarusian regime, such as the forced landing of a Ryanair flight and the migration crisis on the Belarus-Poland border.

The same inconsistency is seen in the targeting of sanctions. For example, the Minsk Wheeled Tractor Plant (MZKT), the flagship of the Belarusian military-industrial complex, whose workers demonstrated their resistance to Lukashenko and his actions in 2020, was sanctioned by the EU the same year.

The sanctions are a controversial political tool so it is hard to expect full transparency and objectivity from the involved parties.

Therefore, trust in them will continue to fall until the involved parties enhance their information policies on sanctions and become completely honest with Belarusians.