The head of Myanmar’s military junta arrived in Belarus yesterday for a two-day state visit aimed at shoring up support for his sanctioned and besieged military administration.
Arriving from St. Petersburg, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing was welcomed at the airport in Minsk by Belarusian Minister of Foreign Affairs Maksim Ryzhenkov, the Belarusian government said in a statement on Wednesday, and is slated to hold talks today with President Alexander Lukashenko “in a narrow and expanded format.”
“The two leaders will discuss cooperation in trade, economy and humanitarian affairs and will thrash out plans for the future,” the report stated. “In particular, they will discuss collaboration in industry, agriculture, pharmaceutics and science.” A number of bilateral documents will be signed following the talks, BelTA added.
The trip was also given front page treatment by the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar, which said that Min Aung Hlaing was leading a “high-level goodwill delegation” to the former Soviet republic. Min Aung Hlaing last visited Belarus in his capacity as army chief in 2014, during which he met with Lukashenko, who has run the country since 1994.
Min Aung Hlaing’s trip to Belarus forms a coda to his four-day state visit to Russia, which involved his first official meeting with President Vladimir Putin. During their meeting at the Kremlin, Min Aung Hlaing thanked Russia for its diplomatic and military backing and predicted victory for Russia in its ongoing war against Ukraine. In return, Putin said that aid that Myanmar and Russia were “bound by truly strong bonds of friendship, traditions of support, and mutual assistance.”
The specific outcomes of the Belarus visit are in some ways less important than the fact of the visit itself. Like his visit to Russia, Min Aung Hlaing’s trip to Minsk reflects his need to offset his regime’s isolation from the West by consolidating economic and security relations with nations that share his fear and suspicion of the Western powers. This has been the main driver of the strategic convergence between Putin’s Russia and Myanmar’s military junta, which have taken repeated steps to enhance their already substantial economic and military relationships, while defending each other’s foreign policies in the face of international opprobrium.
Belarus, an effective satellite of Putin’s Russia that provided substantial support for his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, is one of the few other nations with a strong interest in supporting the military-backed State Administration Council (SAC), if only to frustrate the designs of Western powers. Belarus was the only country to vote against a June 2021 United Nations General Assembly resolution calling on member states to “prevent the flow of arms into Myanmar.” In September 2023, the junta opened a consulate in Minsk.
Belarus has also long been a major supplier of arms to the Myanmar armed forces. In 2022, the advocacy group Justice for Myanmar noted that past Belarusian arms sales to Myanmar include “two Kvadrat-M SAM missile systems, delivered in 2016, one hundred 3M9 surface-to-air missiles, delivered in 2015-16, and two Mi24/Mi-35 combat helicopters, delivered in 2019.” The Belarus-Myanmar military connection was targeted by U.S. government sanctions that were announced in October 2022, against three Myanmar individuals and one entity “for their roles related to the procurement of Russian-produced military arms from Belarus for the Burmese regime.”
Myanmar and Belarus have since moved to expand their relations beyond the defense sphere, particularly in augmenting the currently negligible trade and investment ties between the two nations. In January, Belarusian Foreign Minister Maxim Ryzhenkov led a delegation of ministers and businesspeople on a visit to Naypyidaw and Yangon, during which he held talks with Min Aung Hlaing and other prominent members of the SAC.
This involved the convening of the first Myanmar-Belarus Business Forum in Yangon, during which officials from the two countries discussed possible Belarusian investment in Yangon’s Thilawa Special Economic Zone. After Min Aung Hlaing’s arrival yesterday, another Belarus-Myanmar Business Forum was convened in Minsk, which, according to BelTA, was set to feature presentations from the Union of Myanmar Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the heads of major Myanmar companies.
Meeting with Min Aung Hlaing yesterday, Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Shuleiko said that his government was “very interested in advancing the bilateral trade and economic relations. Belarus is a machine-building and agricultural country. There are many fields where we can be useful to each other.”