Lukashenka’s New Foreign Policy Elite More Focused on China than on Russia, Turarbekova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 4 – Alyaksandr Lukashenka has not only followed Russia in reorienting Belarus away from Europe toward Asia but has gone far beyond Vladimir Putin in preparing a new foreign policy elite that is focused more on China than on any other country, including the Russian Federation, according to Roza Turarbekova.

            Between 2020 and 2025, the Kazakhstan-born Belarusian analysis who taught for many years on the faculty of international relations at Belarus State University says that this reflects what she calls “the de-Europeanization” of Belarus and promises more of the same in the future (dekoder.org/ru/article/pyat-faktorov-predopredelili-deevropeizaciyu-belarusi).

            According to her, after these changes, students at a faculty whose graduates dominate Minsk’s foreign policy operations are focusing on Asia and China in particular; and “even the Russian direction” about which so many speak “is not nearly as clearly expressed” – and while “courses on European themes remain, there are no none about the United States.”

            This shift is reflected not only in the fact that a faculty for the study of contemporary China has been established but in the titles of theses and articles by graduate students. For the years between 2020 and 2024, Turarbekova says, “33 of the 80 were devoted to China, while only 22 were to Europe, only four to the US, and only five to Russia.”

            These shifts do not mean that Belarusians as a whole have reoriented away from Europe and the West, the scholar says; but they do indicate that Lukashenka is now even more focused on China than on anywhere else – and that those countries receiving less attention as a result are not only the Europeans and the Americans but even the Russians.