The Belarus Change Tracker: Seeing Trends Through the News Fog

Since 2022, a team of six researchers in exile has tracked developments in the economy, society, public opinion, politics, and political communication in Belarus.

The level of opposition in Belarus to participating in military action in Ukraine remains high despite the regime’s propaganda efforts, according to the seventh edition of the Belarus Change Tracker. The sociologist Philipp Bikanau, one of the authors, says that this is “despite two and a half years of repression in the country for taking a pro-Ukrainian stance, constant information spin, and the popularity of Russian TV channels”. However, Belarusians also mostly refuse to support either Russia or Ukraine. 

The tracker shows that the war remained at the center of the agenda of pro-government and pro-democratic media alike between September 2023 and May 2024. “I am surprised by the resilience of Belarusians to propaganda”, Bikanau adds. “The flow of regime propaganda has been ongoing since 2020 and intensified in 2022. It generates more ideas than pro-democratic speakers do”.

No More “Goldfish Mode”

The Belarus Change Tracker is a quarterly analytical report that presents the results of long-term trend analysis of the country’s society, economy, politics, and key propaganda narratives. The authors are experts who were forced to leave Belarus and by 2021 found themselves in Ukraine. At that time, the news flow from the country was overwhelming and it was easy to lose track of it, says Lev Lvovskiy, academic director of the BEROC Economic Research Center.

“The news landscape became chaotic: one day ten people were arrested; the next day sanctions were announced. From 2020, major events started happening every day, and we thought we were forgetting them literally the next day, like living in a goldfish mode”, he adds.

The first edition was published in May 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. One of the reasons for creating it was that the majority of analysts did not foresee the events in Belarus in 2020 or in Ukraine in 2022, explains Lvovskiy. “Tracking long-term trends will make it easier to spot such important emerging changes in the future”.

Besides Lvovskiy and Bikanau, the Belarus Change Tracker team includes Artyom Shraibman, a political scientist and the founder of the Sense Analytics agency; Alesia Rudnik, the academic director of the Center for New Ideas; Pavel Slunkin, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations; and Henadz Korshunau, program director of Belaruskaya Akademia and senior analyst at the Center for New Ideas.

The authors stress that is the only source of such information about the country that is freely accessible to the public and the most popular among analysts, the media, and the international community.

A More Satisfied Population

In the Belarus Change Tracker, the researchers study four groups of Belarusians based on attitudes toward the regime: supporters, opponents, moderate supporters, and moderate opponents. A sharp split has grown between supporters and opponents of the regime; this can be measured through the polarization of opinions on digital platforms.

“The polarization of opinions is increasing regarding almost all issues covered by the pro-government and pro-democratic respondents”, said Rudnik, the author of the political communication section. “Polarization primarily manifests itself in the active discrediting of supporters of the opposite political camp. The level of criticism is constantly increasing, and radical rhetoric is being normalized”.

The regime’s supporters and opponents see each other negatively, to put it mildly, explains Bikanau. And they also see the world around them in significantly different ways. “The world for staunch opponents of Lukashenka looks more hostile than it does for other Belarusians. They don’t feel that the state cares about them and often don’t consider the state as their own at all”, he says.

According to the report, overall satisfaction with the situation in the country significantly increased between August 2023 and May 2024, mainly among moderate opponents or supporters of the regime. Bikanau says that there is an increasing perception that the situation in the country is improving among moderate opponents of the regime, even if they tend to distrust it.

Failure of Economic Diversification

According to Lvovskiy, some things are improving at the economic level. The economy is recovering from the downturn and going back to its prewar level as it adapts to sanctions. “Currently, Belarusian real wages are at record high level”, he says.

However, over the past few years, the economy has changed significantly and not for the better, according to Lvovskiy. The authorities had previously sought to diversify trade and to avoid dependence on a single country. “In this regard, a complete reversal has occurred: we lost our second-largest trading partner after Russia: Ukraine. Another important partner was the EU, but trade with it has halved. As a result, more than 60% of our trade turnover is now with one country—Russia—and the idea of diversification has completely failed. Although there have been some attempts to return to it; for example, the absurd idea of a major economic march to Africa”.

One notable trend is the nationalization of the economy, notes Lvovskiy. This manifests itself not only in the prioritization of state-owned companies over private ones but also in the management of enterprises, in price controls, and labor-market regulation. “Many pro-Lukashenka elites date back to the Soviet Union, and it seems that in any crisis situation, they try to reproduce Soviet times”, he says.

Lukashenka’s Zigzags Do Not Define Belarus

The type of self-reproduction of the power elites in Belarus is also becoming increasingly Soviet, notes Shraibman, and this has intensified since 2022. “This includes the movement toward the cult of Lukashenka’s personality, the militarization of all aspects of life, the regime’s hermetization, and the abandonment of even decorative democratic procedures in favor of more controlled and Soviet-like, essentially totalitarian, formats”, he says.

Shraibman stresses that older political trends endure when it comes to the regime but that there are new ones that mostly concern the opposition. The opposition has faced questions about its identity in the context of the absence of a quick political victory. He notes that these trends can easily be overlooked in the dense flow of news.

“The life of our country is defined not by the flickering news or Lukashenka’s zigzags”, says Shraibman. “The more serious processes matter, including in foreign policy, such as the complete withdrawal of the Russian military presence from Belarus”.

A Separate Country, Not Someone’s Province

The goal of the Belarus Change Tracker is to help readers make informed decisions about the country, Bikanau says. Lvovskiy adds that, when trying to understand long-term trends, it is important to remember Belarus is not a part of Russia. “Belarus is a separate country; it is not a Russian province. This is a basic fact, despite the current rapprochement with Russia and its key role in the Belarusian economy”.

Lvovskiy also notes that Belarusian society is in a “schizophrenic” situation, with a significant portion of the population disagreeing with the authorities on fundamental issues. “This primarily concerns Belarus’s involvement in the aggression against Ukraine. Lukashenka remains a loyal ally of Russia and Putin, but society has not embraced the idea that it is necessary to conquer Ukrainians”, he says.

The presentation of the seventh edition of the Belarus Change Tracker is available on YouTube, or can be downloaded in its  English or Russian versions.