The Shortest, Longest Bus Trip

I love The European Review of Books – based in Maastricht, it’s renowned for its brilliant essays about life across the continent and beyond. This story comes from the East, reporting on a visit to Belarus. There’s lots of rich detail here about life in “Europe’s last dictatorship”, and the absurd vanity of Alexander Lukashenka (the text uses the Belarusian transliteration of his name, rather than the Russian ‘Lukashenko’). But readers in the West shouldn’t feel too comfortable in their cosy democratic freedoms, because the absurdities only intensify once it’s time to cross back into the EU. I hope you’ll enjoy this glimpse of a Europe that not many Europeans get to see.

On 1 July 2024, the European Union announced that, starting from midnight on 16 July, no passenger car with a Belarusian license plate would be allowed entrance into the EU at the border of Belarus and Schengen. The Belarusian capital of Minsk is a mere 185km from the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius; bus services run between the cities. That July, I took a bus to Minsk and back. The “and back” part revealed a border laid bare.

The passenger car ban had long been coming. In 2020, the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenka, officially won the presidential elections in a landslide of 80.23 percent of the votes, unleashing the largest anti-government demonstrations in the history of Belarus. (Lukashenka has been in power since 1994: the country’s first and only president since the office was established.) Extreme repression followed; political opposition was mostly incarcerated, except for those who managed to flee in time, usually to Lithuania and Germany. In response, the West issued economic sanctions.

On 23 May 2021, a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius was intercepted as it flew over Belarus and was diverted to Minsk, so that Belarusian authorities could arrest the opposition activist and journalist Roman Protasevich. Facing even more sanctions, Lukashenka threatened to “flood” the EU with “drugs and migrants”: “Now you will eat them and catch them yourselves.” Throughout 2021, tens of thousands of unauthorized border crossing attempts were recorded by the governments of Estonia, Lithuania and Poland. Migrants, stemming mostly from the Middle East and North Africa, explained that they had had the support of the Belarusian authorities, who had given them instructions about how and where to cross the EU’s border, what to tell the border guards on the other side, and even provided them with wire cutters and axes. The EU accused the Belarusian KGB of engaging in hybrid warfare and of manufacturing a migration crisis.

War in Ukraine, with Belarus deemed a co-aggressor, brought more sanctions – together with more problems for Belarusian citizens, especially those who had emigrated, or wanted to. Their countries of reception (mainly the Baltics and Poland) were adopting increasingly restrictive immigration policies under the banner of “national security”. In just four years the Belarusian-Schengen border had grown thicker, denser, mightier than ever.

The day after the EU’s car exclusion took effect, Belarus responded with strategically open arms. The Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced a temporary visa-free entry on land for all EU citizens, to be effective from 19 July, 8:00am, through the end of 2024 (a policy extended into 2025, and then 2026). The stated goal: “to further demonstrate the openness and peacefulness of our country, its commitment to the principles of good-neighborliness, as well as to facilitate inter-human contacts and improve freedom of movement.”

And so in late July I found myself couched in seat #3 of a Eurolines bus to Minsk. I am, I should mention, a Spanish graduate student of Slavic languages and cultures. To improve my Russian, I’d been living in Tallinn, Estonia, with a Belarusian family. Long story short, they had driven to Minsk before the EU’s ban, and were therefore stuck in that city with a car they couldn’t drive back. My diversion to Minsk was not the stuff of spy novels but of pedestrian border policies: I was to deliver a second set of keys to that family’s vestigial Hyundai (so that they could sell it, at a loss, before returning home to Tallinn). And while I was at it, to glimpse that riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma that is (as Condoleezza Rice nicknamed Belarus back in 2005) “Europe’s last dictatorship”.