“The Lithuanians Have Our Back”: Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s Office and the United Transitional Cabinet in the Face of Fragmented Western Support

Abstract

The chapter discusses the relationship between the Lithuanian authorities and the Office of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the Belarusian opposition leader recognized as the national leader of Belarus by the West and exiled to Vilnius. The analysis focuses on the period of 2020–2023. It argues that Tsikhanouskaya’s Office and the United Transitional Cabinet, created in 2022, benefitted from fragmented Western funding and political support that made them more autonomous vis-à-vis the host state. To support its claims about the nature of the partnership between the Office and Lithuania, the chapter examines firstly the Office’s long-standing reluctance to make a geopolitical choice in favor of the EU and, secondly, its protests against the attempts by the Lithuanian president Gitanas Nauséda to “harmonize” the sanctions against Belarusian and Russian citizens. The study relies on interviews with members of Tsikhanouskaya’s Office/Cabinet and political activists from other opposition initiatives in exile, conducted by Ekaterina Pierson-Lyzhina in 2022–2023, as well as on public communication on social media and with independent media outlets.