ANALYSIS

Who is Lukashenko? The dictator desperate to be more than Putin’s lackey

The Belarusian leader owes his long grip on power to being wily, shrewd and ruthless

Brought up in Soviet Belarus, Lukashenko was said to long for power “with all fibres of his soul”
GETTY IMAGES

Saturday July 01 2023, 6.00pm, The Sunday Times

Alexander Lukashenko does not want anyone to call him a hero. He doesn’t want a statue either. He was simply doing his job.

Or so the Belarusian dictator told his generals in a medal ceremony last week as he re-enacted several key phone calls last weekend with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner group boss, that supposedly brought Russia back from the brink of civil conflict as tanks advanced towards Moscow.

“I called him at 11am. Yevgeny was euphoric. He used ten times more swearwords than normal words,” Lukashenko said, with trademark bluster, “I told him, ‘Zhenia [the familiar form of Yevgeny] . . . ‘they’ll crush you like a bedbug halfway there.’ ”