Putin's pal in Minsk

PRESIDENT ALEXANDER Lukashenko of Belarus, who won a third six-year term Sunday in elections that European observers decried as unfair and unfree, is an unregenerate Stalinoid thug. Before the vote, his security service, which still proudly retains the initials KGB, warned would-be protestors that they would be liable for the death penalty if they took to the streets to demonstrate against the rigged election process.

In case that message was not intimidating enough, Lukashenko warned Friday that he was aware of contacts between foreign governments and the political opposition. Said Lukashenko of his closely watched political opposition: ''We know where they met, whom they met with, and what discussions they had. God forbid they should try to perpetrate something in the country. We will twist off their heads as though they are ducklings."

This is hardly the discourse of a democrat. It does not even reflect the style of a reformed communist; in the summer of 1991, Lukashenko supported the cluster of hard-line Russian communist leaders who attempted a coup by ostensibly kidnapping Mikhail Gorbachev. Indeed, the former collective farm boss who has ruled Belarus with an iron hand since 1994 has warmly praised Hitler, saying the Nazi fuehrer ''deserved credit for forming a strong state."

Lukashenko stays in power by means of fierce repression, control of the media, and a state-run economy that survives on subsidized natural gas and oil from his patron in the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin. The value of those subsidies runs between $3 billion and $5 billion a year. Lukashenko uses this funding to provide scant but stable salaries and pensions to workers who toil in an economy that is impervious to the rules of supply and demand. As in Soviet times, uncompetitive factories producing shoddy, undesirable goods are propped up with credit from state-run banks.

With protests ongoing in Minsk, the United States and the European Union are threatening Lukashenko's regime with sanctions as a consequence of Sunday's sham election. However much Lukashenko's inner circle might be inconvenienced by visa bans or by efforts to freeze their foreign bank accounts, the only near-term threat they need fear would come from Russia. If Russia's state-controlled energy company Gazprom raises the steeply discounted prices it charges Belarus for energy, it could shatter the Soviet-style social contract that keeps Lukashenko in power.

Thus far, Putin has been willing to pay the upkeep for an embarrassing ally. When Putin hosts the other members of the G-8 this July in St. Petersburg, they ought to tell him Lukashenko is not a fit protege for a Russia with democratic pretensions.