Belarus minister said he feared Putin would annex his country after Ukraine, Finland reveals

A Belarusian minister said he was afraid Russia would annex his country after doing the same to Ukraine shortly before his sudden death last year, Finland has revealed.

Vladimir Makei, the former foreign minister of the country closely allied with Russia, died in November last year at the age of 64. No official cause of death was given.

Now, Finland’s foreign minister Pekka Haavisto has said he had spoken with Makei after Russian president Vladimir Putin illegally proclaimed Russia had annexed four regions in Ukraine – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – on September 30.

Haavisto said Makei, who had held his ministry position since 2012, was ‘very worried about whether Belarus would be the fifth [region]’ in an interview with Finnish tabloid newspaper Iltalehti, which was published on Wednesday.

The Finnish politician said he found Makei’s concerns noteworthy because from the outside, officials in Minsk appeared to be firm supporters of Russia ‘in every way’, according to the Iltalehti report.

While Belarus has not directly been involved in the year-long fighting between Russia and Ukraine, autocrat Alexander Lukashenko allowed Moscow’s armies to use his country as a launchpad for their invasion on February 24, 2022.

Belarus has also allowed Russia to use its land to conduct military drills, and has threatened Ukraine that it would get involved should Belarusian territory come under attack, in what some analysts feared was the groundwork for a false flag attack that would pave the way for Mink’s forces to join those from Russia.

Haavisto said when discussing Russia’s potential ambitions, sweat began dripping from Makei’s forehead, and that he said you cannot predict who would next find themselves in the sights of Putin’s imperialistic ambitions.

Last week, a group of journalists released a report that appeared to suggest that Makei’s concerns were not unfounded.

The report from the reporters claimed they had recieved leaked presidential documents that showed Russia is allegedly planning to annex Belarus and absorb it into the Russian Federation by the year 2030.

The secret dossier, reportedly dated to the summer of 2021, was entitled ‘Strategic Goals of the Russian Federation in Belarus’ and set out three possible approaches – short, medium and long-term – to annexing Belarus, a piece of ‘historical Russia’.

The medium-term plan would see Belarus formally become part of Russia as early as 2025, while the long-term plan gives a time frame of seven years from 2023.

The plans were reportedly drawn up by Russia’s Presidential Directorate for Cross-Border Cooperation – a governmental division established by Putin in 2018 – and were obtained by Yahoo! News and German outlet Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

If verified as authentic, the documents would confirm that Putin has ordered Russia’s intelligence services and armed forces to prepare to annex yet another country, even as his armies struggle to make significant gains in their goal of taking Ukraine.

But the despot’s desire to take control of Belarus as well as Ukraine would hardly come as a surprise, and would suggest Makei was right to be concerned.

Haavisto said he was in contact with Makei since the start of the war, because he wanted to understand what Belarus was thinking about Russia and its invasion.

‘It is worth following, because even though Belarus’s support seems very active, there is some kind of reservation,’ he told the tabloid. 

He pointed to Belarus saying it supported Russia in every way, while not actually joining the conflict, as an interesting contradiction. 

‘It gives a double message, which is quite interesting, and at least Belarus has not yet joined the most active hostilities across the border,’ he said. 

Makei himself was the subject of a new report last week, which claimed that the former foreign minister had committed suicide just days after he returned from a meeting with Putin’s Kremlin officials in Aermenia.

According the independent Belarusian media outlet Nasha Niva, which cited four unrelated sources, Makei’s friends said he was ‘painfully upset by the collapse of the course he was leading’.

Lukashenko had wanted to replace his chief diplomat, who had served Belarus for over a decade. As Lukashenko has grown increasingly close to Putin, it is understood that Makei wanted to strengthen his country’s relationship with the West.

‘Recently, he has been denied personal attention [from Lukashenko],’ Makei’s colleague is quoted anonymously in the report. ‘It was very perceptible to him.’

Another said that Makei understood his position was coming to an end, and that he felt increasingly ‘unnecessary’ and ‘out of place’.

The report claims Makei had said seven months before his death: ‘I don’t remember who said it, but if you are going to be executed, then it is better to be executed for loyalty than for treason.’

It added that those close to him do not believe he was murdered. 

Lukashenko attended Makei’s funeral on November 29. The dictator was seen in photographs standing over his open casket, squeezing Makei’s arm.

Moscow did not send Makei’s Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov to the funeral. 

The revelation from Finland’s foreign minister came as Lukashenko told his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that his country ‘fully supports’ Beijing’s proposals for ending the Ukraine war when the two leaders met Wednesday.

The state visit to the Chinese capital by Lukashenko – a staunch ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin – comes after Beijing published a position paper on Moscow’s war in Ukraine insisting it is a neutral party and calling for dialogue.

Western countries have criticised China for failing to condemn Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, while Beijing has reacted furiously to recent claims by the United States and NATO that it may be contemplating arms transfers to Russia.

The position paper was met with scepticism from Ukraine’s allies, while Russia acknowledged the proposal but said the conditions for a peaceful resolution of the conflict were not in place ‘at the moment’.