A FEW hours drive east from the borders of the European Union takes you several decades back into the era of Soviet show trials, political prisoners, a planned economy and black markets. Belarus, the former Soviet republic ruled by Alyaksandr Lukashenka, a nasty Stalinist thug, never made it across the Berlin Wall. Twenty years after the Soviet collapse, show trials are taking place on the EU's doorstep.

A peaceful protest against a rigged presidential election last December ended in mass arrests of most presidential candidates and their supporters. Some of the women were released to house arrest. Most men stayed in jail. A conveyor belt of trials is now in motion. Andrei Sannikov, a former diplomat who contested Mr Lukashenka, is facing the most serious charge: organising public disorder. A 15 year-prison sentence could result. On May 11th, his wife, Irina Khalip, a journalist for Russia's Novaya Gazeta newspaper, was brought to court. She faces a three-year sentence. International observers, including those from Russia and Ukraine, have been kicked out.

The trials are a farce. Last month, on the first day of Mr Sannikov's, 21 of 29 police witnesses took sick leave or went on holiday. One who turned up said he received a bruise on his backside and spent four days in hospital. But the sentences are no joke. One of Mr Sannikov's aides, Dmitry Bondarenko, has already received two years.

The actual “disorder” seems to be the work of Mr Lukashenka's multiple security services, who staged a provocation on election night, smashing a few windows in a government building and using it as a pretext for arrests. The opposition is also being implicitly blamed by Mr Lukashenka for a terrorist attack on the Minsk underground on April 11th which killed 14 people and injured 200. “Before the elections we had so much so-called democracy that it has made us nauseated,” Mr Lukashenka said.

What sickens most people, however, is Belarus's deepening financial crisis. Unable to fulfil his populist promises to raise salaries and to borrow money from the West, Mr Lukashenka has been forced to devalue the currency. This not only wipes out people's savings but also removes one of the pillars of his support: the older, rural population.

“Today Belarus is being threatened from abroad. A bitter information and political war is being waged against it,” Mr Lukashenka told his country during a May 9th parade marking the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany. In fact, the European response to Mr Lukashenka's thuggery has been feeble. The EU has re-imposed visa bans and targeted the personal accounts of government officials, but, unlike America, has not yet introduced wider economic sanctions.

Still, Mr Lukashenka's usual tactic of trading political hostages for economic concessions has got him nowhere, as both the EU and America have demanded an unconditional release of political prisoners. José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, even refused to be in the same room as Mr Lukashenka during a recent commemoration of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

"I don't want to talk about types like Barroso and other morons and assholes and the like,” said Mr Lukashenka in response. As Fedor Lukyanov, the editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a journal, argues, by stepping up his repression Mr Lukashenka has destroyed his long-standing political tactic of playing Russia off against the West.

By isolating himself from the West, Mr Lukashenka has made himself ever more dependent on Russia, which has been dangling (though not releasing) a large credit line to Belarus. On one hand the Kremlin distrusts Mr Lukashenka because of his constant reneging on promises. On the other it needs him to keep Belarus away from the West. Now Moscow can afford to put pressure on Mr Lukashenka until he cedes control of state firms, including its refineries, and fully complies with the customs union between Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, which Moscow sees as an alternative to the EU.

In the past Mr Lukashenka often managed to outwit both Moscow and Brussels. This time he may have overplayed his hand. While he is prosecuting his opponents in Minsk, international human-rights lawyers are compiling a case against Mr Lukashenka. He may still be able to travel to Moscow, but his ultimate European destination may be an international tribunal in The Hague.