Belarus is a plain whose state faces east

Belarus is flat, and that flatness is the political fact. A plain without a sea lies between the European Union and Russia. Minsk governs the plain, and the state faces east.

The state calls itself Belarus. On this map it is the country of that name. It has 9,085,991 people on 207,600 square kilometres. There is no coast. To the west lie Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, that is the European Union. To the east and north lies Russia, to the south Ukraine. Minsk sits roughly in the middle of this plain, not at a port and not at a mountain pass.

A plain without a sea

Anyone driving from Poland toward Russia crosses a landscape without a natural barrier. Rivers such as the Dnieper organise the plain. They do not close it. In the south the country passes into the marshes of Polesia and toward the Pripyat. This is not an empty nowhere. It is settled, agricultural country, opened up by roads and rail. The openness of the map is why every border here is a political decision, not a mountain edge.

A landlocked state on such a plain lives by transit and by the question of who owns that transit. Energy, goods and the military think in the same directions. The western border is the external border of the European Union, and of NATO on the other side. The eastern border is not a comparable threshold. It is the long side facing Russia, the neighbour to which the state has tied itself.

Minsk faces east

The capital is the largest city and the seat of government, in the middle of the country. The official languages are Belarusian and Russian. In the daily life of the cities, Russian is often the language that is heard. Belarusian is not folklore, but it is not the language in which the state mostly speaks. The currency is the Belarusian ruble. With Russia there is a Union State. It has been drawn up, without Belarus and Russia having dissolved into it. Minsk remains the capital of a separate state whose foreign policy and whose economy still face east.

The constitution gathers power in the presidency. After a disputed presidential election, mass protests took place. The state put them down. That is the inward face of the same orientation: a plain that is easy to cross is governed from a centre that does not treat dissent as part of the order. The openness of the landscape has not produced an open politics.

The map is flat. The tie to Russia is not.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

The south still carries Chernobyl

The Chernobyl reactor stood across the border in Ukraine. The fallout hit the south of Belarus. In Polesia there is a restricted zone that goes back to those consequences. Villages, forest and the Pripyat lowland there are not simply a rural idyll. They are a burdened zone in a state that has no coast to retreat to anyway. The south is a reminder that the plain also receives what the neighbour cannot hold.

That is why Belarus is not the empty space between the European Union and Russia. It is a state of its own, with a capital, with Belarusian and Russian as official languages, and with a western border that is closely watched, while the eastern tie is politically chosen. The plain explains why the country is so easy to cross. It does not explain why the state has placed itself so clearly toward the east. That is a decision, not a landform.

Belarus can be mistaken for a corridor country, because the map shows no resistance. Minsk shows the resistance somewhere else: in the tie, not in the terrain.