Russia, Belarus Sign a Pact to Unite

Further distancing himself from the West as pivotal elections approach, President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia signed a pact Wednesday with Belarus that calls for heightened military cooperation and eventually a merger of the two countries.

An unsteady Yeltsin, who at one point didn’t realize that he had finished his speech and who needed help from an aide to reorient himself, reached the agreement with Alexander G. Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus, who is accused of holding on to power illegitimately after his term as president of the former Soviet republic expired last summer.

While the Russian-Belarussian treaty is largely a symbolic bid to win support from people in both countries who long for a restoration of the Soviet Union, a secondary accord signed by the presidents has a more immediate effect: It permits Russia to post troops in Belarus on the border with Poland, a new member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

President Clinton and European leaders whom Yeltsin once counted as friends have been increasingly critical of Russia’s devastating war in the separatist republic of Chechnya, in which an untold number of civilians have died.

With parliamentary elections set for Dec. 19, Yeltsin has made the West a frequent political target and defended Russia’s right to fight “terrorists” in Chechnya. Russia and Belarus have signed similar agreements to form a union during the past three years, but the Russian electorate never seems to tire of hearing the leaders’ plan to reunite the two countries.

“It is all too obvious that the whole story with the agreement between Belarus and Russia to form a union state is nothing but a game,” said Dmitri Y. Furman, senior analyst at the Moscow-based Institute of Europe. “It is a political show, pure and simple.”

Lukashenko--a former collective farm director who has sought to stamp out his democratic opposition--is one of the few world leaders to defend Russia’s conduct in the Chechen war. On Wednesday, he assured Yeltsin that Russia has a “safe and strong friend on the western border who has never sold you out.”

Yeltsin, referring to the merger of the two countries as if it had already occurred, said the agreement isn’t directed at the United States, nor is Russia seeking to withdraw behind a new Iron Curtain.

“The Union State of Russia and Belarus, built on the basis of preserving the sovereignty and independence of the member countries, is not aimed against anyone, even against Clinton,” he said. “We do not intend to become isolated.”

Yeltsin, who was discharged from the hospital Monday after treatment for pneumonia, read his speech in a strong voice but didn’t seem to know when he had reached the end. Standing before the audience, he turned his text one way and then another for a good 20 seconds, appearing hopelessly lost. He stumbled slightly, and Lukashenko, seated next to him, reached out to support him.

When an aide came over and whispered to Yeltsin that he had reached the end of the speech, the president read the last line again in a firm voice and sat down.

Hours later, Yeltsin left for Beijing, where he will meet with Chinese President Jiang Zemin in an apparent effort to win support for the war in Chechnya.

Lukashenko has long pushed for the union with Russia, apparently motivated by his ambition to become president of the united country. As president of Belarus, he has become widely known for his autocratic methods and scorn for the West. He forced through a referendum that extended his term from 1999 to 2001, an election that has never been recognized as legitimate by the United States, among other countries.

In recent months, two of Lukashenko’s critics, former government officials Victor Gonchar and Yuri Zakharenko, have disappeared. On Wednesday, Lukashenko said he believed that they had left the country and called on the West for assistance in finding them.

“Help us find those people,” he said. “They are not in Belarus. If they were in Belarus, we would find them as a needle in a stack of hay.”

Opposition leader Semyon Sharetsky, who earlier fled to Lithuania, said the union treaty with Russia is invalid because Lukashenko is not the legal president. “The treaty was signed under the conditions of an emerging dictatorship in Belarus,” he said. “A free and democratic discussion of its content and consequences is impossible.”

In the short term, the most significant outcome of the treaty may be military, said Viktor A. Kremenyuk, deputy director of the Moscow-based USA-Canada Institute. Conceivably, the pact could allow Russia to bring nuclear weapons to Belarus for the first time since 1992, when they were withdrawn in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Lukashenko, who came to power just after the missiles were removed, has criticized the decision as a mistake that made Belarus and Russia vulnerable to NATO and the West.