Molochnaya Voyana!!

I'm not sure who exactly coined the term Milk War but it really does make it all sound a bit silly. Not nearly as bad as Pravda, whose headline reads "Lukashenko bares his milk teeth." That hardly makes any sense. Then again, it's Prvada.

Anyway, The NYT breaks it down rather sensibly: Russia and a handful of its former satellites under the Soviet Union are due to enter into a joint military alliance. Uzbekistan has already indicated that they will have nothing to do with it unless a few provisions are changed and now that mustachioed post-bloc villain Lukashenko is saying Belarus won't join the party unless Russia allows Belarus to import milk to them. This is not a big surprise given that 95% of Belarus milk exports are to Russia. Now, I'm no captain of industry but losing that much of your market share seems like it would be a bad thing.

Why the hate for Belarusian milk? Well, it all goes back to the Georgian conflict over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, actually. Russia's pretty sore that good buddies Belarus haven't joined fellow sympathizers Nicaragua in recognizing the two breakaway regions. Since that all went down last year, Russia has withheld 1/4th of a two billion dollar loan to Belarus until Lukashenko "overhauls" the country's economic policies. They apparently have not done this.

Which brings us to today and Dmitri Anatolyevich et. al. just being really torn up and brokenhearted about the whole mess. Medvedev on Belarus not attending Russia's big "Fuck NATO" party: “Aleksandr Grigorievich Lukashenko did not call me on the telephone, and did not tell me he was intending to make a decision to not attend.”

Harsh, man.

I'm not really sure what Lukashenko thinks he can get from Europe from all of this. I mean, sure, Europe is theoretically dumb enough to embrace anyone who wants to be a part of their big melting pot, but Lukashenko is insane. Insane. He has directly said or implied (depending on who you ask) that Belarus sees Nazi Germany as a viable economic model and they had such problems with one of their newspapers, Nasha Niva (which means, amazingly: Our Grain Field) printing numerous anti-semitic articles that they had to shut the paper down. Anti-semitism is a BIG problem in the country.

Nevertheless, as the Times article points out, Belarus released some prisoners and got a call to join the EU minor league farm team or whatever and the IMF has promised to give them an additional billion dollars.

Seems like Lukashenko is realizing that Moscow and Minsk are not BFF and that Russia's support is untenably conditional. I certainly don't think Russia looks approvingly on them turning westward for help at any rate and this is likely to continue to be a problem for both countries until something is resolved. Russia really does need the smaller countries in its sphere of influence in order to revamp their abysmal military; Belarus, on the other hand, might be more amenable to Russia's demands than the EU's.