Creeping Annexation? Moscow Expands Use Border Regions to Increase Its Influence in Neighboring Belarusian Ones

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 24 – Vladimir Putin has taken another page from Stalin’s playbook and is using the western border regions of the Russian Federation to expand Moscow’s influence in neighboring Belarusian ones, weakening Minsk and raising questions about the Kremlin’s intentions not only with regard to annexing Belarus but using it to attack Ukraine.
    According to two new reports (rubaltic.ru/article/ekonomika-i-biznes/20241123-regiony-belarusi-i-rossii-uglublyayut-ekonomicheskoe-vzaimodeystvie/ and eurasia.expert/regiony-belarusi-i-rossii-ukreplyayut-gorizontalnye-svyazi/), Moscow has quietly expanded this effort over the last several months.
    Using border regions to promote larger policy goals has been a long-standing Russian and before that Soviet strategy (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/09/russian-governors-playing-increasing.html, windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/12/cross-border-trade-means-for-russia-to.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/06/moscow-expanding-its-influence-in.html).
    But the situation with regard to such regional cooperation in the Russian-Belarusian case now inevitably raises questions about Moscow’s intentions -- especially in the wake of Putin’s war in Ukraine, one that the Kremlin invoked as a casus belli earlier transfers of what it claims as Russian territories, including Crimea and the Donbass, to Ukraine.
    That is all the more so because as one Moscow writer has pointed out, “the most significant land gift from the RSRSR under Stalin” to another republic did not involve transfer of control of territory from Russia to Ukraine but land from Russia to Belarus (russian7.ru/post/kakie-territorii-stalin-prisoedinil/).
    Between 1924 and 1926, the Soviet government transferred from the RSFSR to Belarus, almost all of Vitebsk, Mogilyev and Gomel oblasts, moves far larger than the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine and that increased the size of the Belarusian SSR by three times (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/07/stalin-frequently-modified-russias.html).