Lord Bell, PR guru and Tory peer, has plied his dark arts for some fairly controversial characters in the past – Augusto Pinochet, Boris Berezovsky, Michael Chernoi, even Margaret Thatcher – but even he might have his hands full with his latest project: spinning Aleksander Lukashenko, the iron man of Belarus and the ‘last dictator of Europe’.
Last week, Bell met with Lukashenko in Minsk, where the moustachioed strong-man asked Lord Bell how he could improve his image in the West.
Bell told the Moscow Times:
He would like his country to be better understood, and his successes to be better grasped. He has raised pensions and wages and would understandably like to shift the focus to these areas. Lukashenko doesn’t see why Belarus can’t be a friend to the West and a friend to Russia at the same time.
The fact is, Lukashenko is increasingly neither a friend of Russia’s, nor the West. Western countries dislike him for his iron rule of the country, his use of the KGB to crush the opposition and free press, and his provocative and belligerent treatment of Western diplomats in the past.
Russia, meanwhile, dislikes him for his obstreperousness towards the Kremlin (yes, he’s no more gracious with Russia), his embarrassing outbursts on the international stage, and above all his unwillingness to give them control of the transit pipelines through which Gazprom exports around 20% of its EU deliveries.
Russia is fed up with subsidizing Belarus’ state-owned economy with cheap gas. They started putting up the gas price in 2006, and now it looks like Lukashenko is feeling the heat.
Don’t write him off just yet, however. He’s still pretty popular with Belarus’ elderly population and farm-workers in State-owned communes, who for the last decade have staved off the harsh reality of a post-Soviet world by drowning themselves in cheap gas and state-produced vodka.
