Last summer, in a small town overlooking the Russian border, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko made a stark and pointed pronouncement. “If we don’t survive these years—if we fail,” he said, “it means we will have to become part of some other state, or they will simply wipe their feet on us. God forbid they unleash another war, like in Ukraine.”

Lukashenko was referring to Russia.

In March 2014, Russia responded to the ousting of pro-Russia Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych by annexing Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. The seizing of Crimea provoked widespread condemnation from the international community along with a wave of ongoing sanctions against Russia. Since then, NATO has redoubled its military presence in Eastern Europe, particularly in the Baltic states where, as in Crimea, a large ethnically Russia population could provide enough context for another land grab. The last few months, however, have raised the question of whether they may be focusing on the wrong places. In February, NATO’s general secretary, Anders Rasmussen, warned of a “repetition of the Ukrainian scenario” not in the Baltics, but in Belarus.

As Lukashenko is known for dramatic outbursts, his speech—which might have caused an international incident coming from any other leader—was baldly reported on the national news wire and quickly forgotten about. Ten months later, the president’s words do not sound quite as absurd as they did back in June. While Lukashenko has accused Putin’s government of trying to topple him many times in recent years, the prospect of Russian annexation, one way or another, no longer seems the stuff of conspiracy theories. In December 2018, at the meeting of the Belarus-Russia Union State Council of Ministers, Russian prime minister Dmitri Medvedev broached the topic, suggesting integrating the two countries via a joint judiciary and customs service, a common currency and, above all, a Union State constitution. The notion of deeper integration between Russia and Belarus has been bandied around since the mid-2000s. But Medvedev this time was not proffering a suggestion, but an implicit ultimatum: Russia is contemplating changes to its oil industry regulations, which would force Belarus to start buying Russian oil at non-subsidized rates—a blow that Minsk estimates will cost them around $10 billion by 2024. The message was clear: Either unite, or suffer an economic disaster.

While the Russian constitution bars Putin from serving two consecutive terms, a new union constitution could enable him to serve beyond 2024.

Lukashenko has angrily pushed back against the threat, and at a meeting with Putin in February, he made a point of stressing “the holy sanctity” of his nation’s independence. The question is how determined Russia is to see through its plans for a union, and how far it will go to achieve it. Belarus is no Ukraine, with whom Minsk stood in solidarity in 2014 over Crimea—a defiant signal against similar incursions into their own territory. Whereas Ukraine suffered for its attempts to escape Moscow’s grasp, Belarus will suffer from the fact that it has, throughout its post-Soviet history, clung too tightly to the Muscovite breast. Unlike other nations in the region, whose post-Soviet pathways have varied from western-style liberalism to steroidal capitalism, Belarus differs little from its former communist self and continues to view the old mothership as protector and patron. In a country routinely, even somewhat blithely, labelled a “Soviet theme park,” a state-run economy is still very much alive, but is largely reliant on the largesse of the Russian state, which remains one of its very few foreign investors and trade partners.