Belarus is not Ukraine either now or should Moscow try to annex it, Russian analysts are warning. It is far more integrated as a society than Ukraine is, with far fewer regional, linguistic or even religious divisions than exist in Ukraine; and it is far more European because so many of its people have visited Poland and other neighbors or even gone there to work for a time. As a result, Moscow has little hope of repeating the strategy it used in Ukraine to play one region or linguistic group against another (see Eurasia Daily Monitor, August 13; Krizis-Kopilka, September 9; Sovershenno Sekretno, August 30).
That argument accounts for much of the Kremlin’s present halting approach toward Belarus, where it has not been able to use the playbook Vladimir Putin employed in Georgia in 2008 or in Ukraine since 2014. And it also helps to explain why a growing number of Russians fear that, while Moscow could annex part of Ukraine more or less successfully, it would face disaster if it sought to annex Belarus as a whole.