A female cosmonaut is Putin's payback for Lukashenko's Belarusian allegiance

1. Two-week ticket to the ISS
2. Landlocked on the Baltic and bordering Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Russia

Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, has just brought back to earth 33-year-old Marina Vasilevskaya, who has become the first woman of Belarusian nationality to travel into space and spend a dozen days aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

A flight attendant for Belavia Airlines, Belarus' state airline, Marina Vasilevskaya returned safely on 6 April when she landed in a Russian Soyuz capsule on the Kazakh steppe in Central Asia.

The news is particularly significant because it is closely linked to the war in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin, his government and Kremlin strategists are fully aware of the enormous importance of keeping Belarus at all costs as their closest and most loyal ally in their military operation to wrest territory from Kiev.

The Moscow and Minsk governments have a close alliance in politics, trade, economics and, above all, security and defence. It dates back to the ratification in December 1999 of the so-called Union State, a supranational entity agreed by then Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Aleksander Lukashenko in an attempt to unite the two nations under a confederal path.

From 2006 onwards, however, bilateral relations deteriorated significantly. Gradually, however, they returned to their previous course due to Lukashenko's domestic political problems, which advised him to strengthen his ties with the Kremlin. For the Russian authorities, Belarus is the linchpin of their pseudo-NATO, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, or CSTO for short.

Two-week ticket to the ISS

So the Kremlin cannot afford to let Lukashenko waver in the face of the pressures and sanctions that the US, the EU and its member states apply to both of them. What instruments does Putin use to maintain the loyalty of his southern neighbour?

Moscow rewards the concessions of all kinds that the Minsk government asks for and gives it in many ways. One of them is through payment in kind, and nothing better than helping to make a slender, beautiful young woman-turned-cosmonaut into a national hero and role model for the entire population of Belarus... for the greater glory of President Lukashenko.

During her 12-day stay in the orbital complex, Marina Vasilevskaya carried out research tasks assigned to her by the Belarusian National Academy of Sciences. These included finding new substances with which to prepare food for cosmonauts. She tested probiotics and lactoferrin, an antimicrobial protein found in human milk, which is used to boost the natural immune system and help the intestinal build-up of beneficial bacteria.

With her space voyage complete, Vasilevskaya's return to Earth was much quicker than the outward journey to the ISS. The Soyuz MS-24 capsule separated from the space station, fired its engines for just over four minutes, detached from its propulsion module and flew through the upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere guided by its automatic flight system.

The main parachute was then opened and, less than a metre above the ground, the retro rockets were fired to minimise the capsule's impact with the ground. The rescue team then pulled Vasilevskaya out into the open and medics checked her vitals and those of her two companions: Lieutenant Colonel and veteran Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky, 52, who has three space missions totalling 545 days in orbit, and NASA engineer Loral O'Hara, 40, who is returning after 203 days and 15 hours on the ISS.

Landlocked on the Baltic and bordering Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Russia

Belarus has been ruled with an iron fist since July 1994 by 69-year-old Alexander Lukashenko, the undisputed but disputed winner of successive presidential elections held every five years. The next election is scheduled for 2025 at a date yet to be determined, but Lukashenko already said in February that he would run.

With nearly 10 million inhabitants for a territory less than half the size of Spain, Belarus was part of the Soviet Union until August 1991, when the collapse of the communist regime was already a fact. Located in Eastern Europe and with no access to the Baltic Sea, it is bordered by Lithuania and Latvia to the north, Poland to the west and Russia to the east, hence its geostrategic importance for the Kremlin.

 The alliance between Moscow and Minsk is epitomised by their respective presidents. Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko maintain very close face-to-face, telephone and video-conference contacts on a permanent and weekly basis. This is the best way they have found to consolidate their ties and especially their military alliance.

Moscow's most recent request, which Lukashenko has already declared he is willing to meet, is for the Minsk parliament to pass a draft law denouncing its accession to the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, better known as the CFE Treaty. Signed in 1990 and in force since 1992, it limits the size and number of large weapons systems held by NATO and then Warsaw Pact countries.

This is linked to another concession to Putin: allowing the deployment of Russian tactical missiles with nuclear warheads, including 9K720 Iskander batteries, on Belarusian territory. Ambassador to the UN Valentin Rybakov argued before the Disarmament and International Security Commission on 5 October that his country is under "unprecedented political and economic pressure". Although we renounced nuclear weapons almost 30 years ago," he said, "the current escalation has forced us to strengthen our defence capabilities from the summer of 2023".