How to Break Lukashenka

On August 9, 2020, Aliaksandr Lukashenka, Belarus’s former president, stole the Belarusian presidential elections. The Western reaction was sharp and instant, but it took time to coalesce and react. One year after the theft of the Belarusian elections, it is time to review the Western policy on Belarus.

In the brief “How to Break Lukashenka” Dr. Anders Åslund examines the possibility for the West to break down the Lukashenka regime by the effective use of various sanctions. The main Western powers – the US, the EU, the UK, Canada, and others – need to cooperate more closely. They should set up a coordinating council for sanctions on Belarus. The West should also impose diplomatic sanctions, disqualifying Lukashenka diplomatically. The most important sanctions, however, are personal sanctions against the ruling clique, their allies and families, as they raise the cost of being close to Lukashenka.

This brief is part of the series “How to Build a Democracy”, which aims to create understanding about reforms within the context of the Belarusian democratization process.

Dr. Anders Åslund is a senior fellow at the Stockholm Free World Forum and an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University. He is chairman of the international advisory council of CASE. He is a leading specialist on economic policy in Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe. He served as an economic advisor to the Russian government (1991-4) and the Ukrainian government (1994-7). He was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and the founding director of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics. He has worked at five Washington think tanks – the Atlantic Council, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution, and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. He earned his D.Phil. from Oxford University.

Dr. Åslund is the author of 16 books and the editor of another 16, including Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy (Yale University Press, 2019); How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of the Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2007, 2013), Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It (Peterson Institute, 2015); How Russia Became a Market Economy (Brookings, 1995); Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform (Cornell University Press, 1989). He has also edited sixteen books. He has also published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal.