This perspective is from Democracy Digest:

Russia’s prime minister will visit Belarus today, Reuters reports (HT:CFR) and Belarus’s defense minister will be in Moscow tomorrow as the two countries step up diplomacy in the face of continued protests (CNN) over Belarus’s disputed presidential election.

“The stakes for Moscow are high…[Russian President Vladimir Putin] has many reasons to hesitate before deciding to prop up a failed regime,” adds CFR’s Stephen Sestanovich, a former National Endowment for Democracy (NED) board member.

“At least until this week, Putin appeared to be holding back. Lukashenko has skillfully played the West and Moscow against each other in recent decades, cozying up to one in order to entice concessions from the other; this has not endeared him to Putin,” Daniel B. Baer writes for Foreign Policy.

Read the full article here.