Former English teacher and nominal victor in Belarus’ presidential election Svetlana Tikhanovskaya has called on the EU to support the revolt against the self-appointed President Alexander Lukashenko by refusing to recognise the official results of the August 9 presidential vote, in a video released online on August 19 in which she spoke in English.

“I have initiated the National Coordination Council of Belarus. It will lead the process of peaceful transition of power via dialogue,” Tikhanovskaya said in a slick video. “It will immediately call for new, fair and democratic presidential elections with international supervision.”

While reaching out to the EU, Tikhanovskaya seemed to include an appeal in her address for the EU not to make the current uprising part of its geopolitical showdown with Russia. She emphasised that the Belarusian people, and by implication, the decisions of the Co-ordinating Council, should remain in charge of the negotiation process in comments that presumably cover talks with both Lukashenko and Russia.

“Honourable leaders of Europe, I call on all countries to support the awakening of Belarus. I call on all countries to respect the principles of international law. I call to respect the sovereignty of Belarus and the choice of the Belarusian people,” Tikhanovskaya concluded.

Tikhanovskaya's appeal comes as something of a stalemate has been reached. The protesters have won control of the streets and defeated the police despite their brutal crackdown. But Lukashenko remains in office.

The president launched a new assault and claimed that the protesters were aiming to join NATO and the EU and planned to ban the Russian language and the Orthodox Church.

More threateningly, Lukashenko has launched an effort to try to break the strike. Three hundred of the most vocal strikers at the iconic Minsk tractor plant were sacked for their activism and police cordoned off the plant itself. There are reports that in other factories workers have been locked into workshops to prevent them walking off the job. And Lukashenko held a video conference with regional leaders to co-ordinate actions at other plants around the country.

Commentators covering Eastern Europe are already calling for an expanded role for the EU that should be at the heart of the negotiations.

Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist and a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, who is representative of the anti-Russia lobby in Washington, called on the EU to rapidly formulate a policy and play a major role in the talks with Russia.

“Today’s Belarus is in desperate need of effective international mediation. The top mediator needs to be a senior politician who knows Belarus well, but who has not antagonised Lukashenka too much in the past. Given that the European Union sanctioned Belarus until 2016 and the United States still does so, possible candidates for the chief mediator role are relatively few in number,” Aslund commented, suggesting someone from either Poland or Lithuania would be best qualified.

The problem is neither Tikhanovskaya nor any of the members of the Co-ordinating Council have called on the EU for this sort of help. But the EU is clearly offering: a German government spokesman admitted over the weekend that EU officials have already met with Tikhanovskaya, who is in exile in Vilnius.

Belarus presents a tricky problem for the EU: on the one hand it wants to support the people’s democratic mission; On the other, if it acts too aggressively then it can be demonised as trying to take the country over, a meme Putin successfully used after the Crimea to rally nationalist sentiment.

At its emergency meeting on August 19 the EU tried to tread the narrow line between these extremes. It said it will reinforce sanctions on Belarus after the “unacceptable violence,” according to French Commissioner Thierry Breton. But he added the bloc will “take Russian concerns into account,” and accepts that a majority of Belarusians favour close links to Moscow.

“Belarus is not Europe. It is on the border of Europe, between Europe and Russia, and the situation is not comparable to Ukraine or Georgia,” the commissioner said. “Belarus is really strongly connected with Russia and the majority of the population favours close links with Russia.”

The foreign policy goals of the Co-ordinating Council were spelt out in more detail during the council’s first meeting the day before. Maria Kolesnikova, Tikhanovskaya colleague in the presidential campaign, made it clear that Belarus wants to strike a balanced and more or less neutral position, where it enjoys good relations with the countries on all its borders, as a key objective. Separately she said the opposition had no intention of withdrawing from the 1999 agreement to create a Union State with Russia that would bring the economies of the two countries much closer together, similar to the EU’s creation of the Eurozone.

"Our official position – we will maintain friendly, mutually beneficial relations that are pragmatic, crystal and transparent for everyone. We benefit from talking to all our partners: the Russian Federation, Ukraine and the EU,” Kolesnikova said during the Council’s first session.

The bottom line is that Tikhanovskaya's message to the EU was very clear and very targeted: refuse to recognise Lukashenko's reported victory. However, there was no invitation to mediate in the dispute, to impose sanctions, or indeed to take any other action at all. Kolesnikova has already rebuked the EU, saying “it’s too soon for sanctions” that the EU imposed on selected individuals last week and argued that they will make the eventual talks with Lukashenko more difficult. It appears that the Co-ordinating Council is very aware of the dangers of being dragged into the geopolitical stand-off between Russia and the West, and desperately wants to avoid becoming another pawn in that game.

FSB arrives in Minsk

Russia walked back fears that it would invade, by making it clear that a military option, or providing Lukashenko with forces to quell the protests, was not an option for Moscow.

Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “there is no need [for] Russian military assistance to Belarus and [the] Belarusian leadership agrees with it.”

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed what is really troubling the Kremlin: “We are worried about the attempt to use the internal difficulties that Belarus, the Belarusian people and the leadership are now facing in order to intervene in these events and processes from the outside. Not just to interfere, but in order to impose on the Belarusians the procedures that external players consider beneficial for themselves. Nobody hides that it is about geopolitics, about the struggle for the post-Soviet space.”

On the evening of August 18 a Russian Tu-214PU aircraft belonging to Russia's FSB Federal Security Service arrived in Minsk from Moscow.

“Presumably, this is a special communications plane, designed to fly in a circle around certain points during field visits of the Russian Federation's top officials," the Belarusian Telegram channel NEXTA Live reported shortly after the plane landed.

According to Novaya Gazeta the plane has been used by Russian FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov, but was certainly carrying a senior FSB office. A meeting then was held between this Russian official and Lukashenko that went on for three hours, after which the plane returned to Moscow.

“We can only speculate about what was said at that meeting, but clearly it was some sort of message that may have included instructions or an offer of sanctuary,” Tadeusz Giczan, a Belarusian PhD candidate at University College London School of Slavonic & East European Studies, told bne IntelliNews during a podcast on the current events.

While the EU representatives have met with Tikhanovskaya, so far there has been no reported contact between the Kremlin and Tikhanovskaya’s team, although there has been a lot of signalling.

Kolesnikova’s comments on potential relations with Russia cannot have been made without some calculations and echo comments made by Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian during the height of the Velvet Revolution, when he was also very careful to make extremely clear that he had no intention of changing Armenia’s policy to Russia or turning away from Moscow if he took office.

There have been few official comments from the Kremlin, other than Putin’s warning to the West not to interfere, but the Russian press has been outspoken against Lukashenko and has widely reported events in Belarus, mostly emphasising the legitimacy of the people’s demands.

Having set the public debate in Russia in those terms, it is highly unlikely that the Kremlin plans to annex Belarus or even prop Lukashenko up, as not only would that alienate the otherwise receptive Belarusian people, it would also not go down well with the Russian population.

At the same time, Moscow does not want to see a chaotic total collapse of the Lukashenko regime, which could lead to unpredictable outcomes. If Lukashenko is going to be forced out of office – which now seems the most likely outcome – then it is in Moscow’s best interests to see a gradual and controlled transition of power.