Nikolai Statkevich: Ukraine Is Also Fighting For Belarus' Independence
1- 22.08.2026, 9:56
Kyiv "abolishes" the empire.
Belarusian opposition leader Nikolai Statkevich discusses the importance of political forecasting in his Telegram channel. However, he cites examples of countries breaking free from geopolitical traps, despite the complexity of the situation:
— At an academic conference in the late 1980s, I met a scholar from Moscow who came from a very old, educated family that had lived in various Islamic countries for centuries and who was very familiar with the southern Soviet regions. We talked about the future of these regions after the collapse of the Soviet empire.
In his view, the Central Asian Soviet republics were destined for “either a khan or Sharia law.” Now we see that there, following the war against Islamists in Tajikistan and the suppression of their uprisings in Uzbekistan, they have so far settled on forms of “khanate” rule.
My interlocutor believed that Azerbaijan had prospects for maintaining its statehood thanks to oil revenues, and predicted problems for Georgia, which, in his words, had difficulty offering anything liquid to international markets. He was also very skeptical about Armenia’s prospects for independent existence; at that time, Armenia was already engaged in an armed conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh and was in a cold conflict with Azerbaijan’s ally, Turkey. Squeezed between its enemies, Armenia, in his view, would have no choice but to “return” to Russia.
But a forecast is not a verdict. And now we see how Armenia is breaking free from its geopolitical trap, albeit by being forced to sacrifice Nagorno-Karabakh. For some reason, this reminds me of a story I once heard about a wolf that, in order to escape a trap, bit off its own paw that had gotten caught in it.
Nikolai Statkevich spoke about another forecast that seemed like a threat to Belarus:
— A cadet at the Minsk Higher Engineering Anti-Aircraft Missile School, for whom I served as thesis advisor, told me after spending his vacation in Moscow about a conversation he’d had at a party with a representative of a certain Russian chauvinist organization. According to my student, the man briefly outlined his vision for the future of the empire. It went like this:
“The Baltic states will leave. They’re strangers to us there; they’ll never be one of us. So let them go. Let the Asian republics leave too—how long can they keep leeching off us? We’ll fight for Ukraine. But it’s too big; I don’t know if we’ll be able to conquer it. And you, Belarusians, just sit tight and don’t even make a peep.”
I don’t know if this warning was directed at me personally—since rumors about my “nationalist” views were already circulating at the academy—or if it was a threat to all Belarusians. But I took it seriously, since the views of that “prophet” were, as I had seen time and again, dominant in Russian society. But at that moment, this threat actually reassured me in a way, since if they themselves weren’t sure whether they would “overcome” Ukraine, then their defeat there would give us a chance at independence as well.
That’s why we had to “make a move”: build our own army and foster a sense of historical and patriotic consciousness in society. But, knowing the mood in Russia, I was constantly waiting for Moscow to launch its revenge.
To be honest, in December 2021, 30 years after the Belovezh Accords that “dissolved” the USSR, I had already begun to hope that it would all end with Crimea and the Donbas—until Moscow issued its unworkable ultimatum to NATO—a classic casus belli (pretext for war)—and until Russian troops were deployed near Mozyr, ostensibly for exercises.
And now Ukraine is fighting not only for its own independence. It is also fighting for the independence of Belarus and the Baltic states, at the very least.
I think the Belarusians who went to Ukraine after the Russian invasion there understand this perfectly well. Yet another paradox of history: Ukraine, thanks to Bohdan Khmelnytsky, once turned Muscovy into an empire by joining it, which, after a long and bloody resistance and the greatest human losses in our history, “dragged” Belarus into this empire as well. And now Ukraine is waging a war to defend its independence and thereby “undo” the empire.
It resembles the correction of historical mistakes.
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