Europe’s last dictator: Lukashenko’s fate depends on Ukraine

A young man wearing combat fatigues and an extravagant moustache, and carrying a heavy machine-gun over his shoulder, nods towards some burned-out armoured vehicles. ‘We smashed the orcs today,’ he says, using the Ukrainian soldiers’ term for the invading Russians, a reference to the sub-human legion in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He goes on: ‘Putin, you are a dickhead – your Greater Russia will die together with you.’ The soldier – his uniform has a badge saying ‘Ivanov’ in Cyrillic – is not, in fact, Ukrainian. He is one of a small number of volunteers from Belarus, next door, a country that is certainly part of the Greater Russian project. But if Ukraine pushes back the Russian invasion, it is just possible that Belarus, too, could slip from Vladimir Putin’s grasp.

Ivanov is speaking on a video released by the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Battalion, named after the young lawyer, journalist and revolutionary who led a 19th-century uprising against the ‘Muscovite empire’.