Donald Trump appears to believe that Belarus’s presidential election was a grand affair, with Alexander Lukaschenko extending his 31-year rule. Belarus state media reported with delight that the US State Department had removed critical comments from outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken from its website.
Victory “demonstrates your high political authority,” Russian president Vladimir Putin gushed about his counterpart in Minsk. Their regular meetings are described by one Belarus political scientist as more “staff briefings” than exchanges between presidents of sovereign states. Since 2020, Lukashenko has visited Russia more than 20 times, while Putin has travelled to Belarus three times. Lukashenko has supported Moscow by accepting Russian troops and nuclear weapons on his country’s soil to further their war on Ukraine. His creaking economy relies on Russian support.
Dubbed Europe’s last dictator, and its longest serving leader, Lukashenko was “re-elected” by 86 per cent of voters at the weekend to his seventh term as president of Russia’s puppet state. The opposition, only able to function abroad, denounced the rigged poll – “a farce” says Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, an activist forced into exile in Vilnius after she, by most accounts, won an election in 2020 against Lukashenko. Her verdict was echoed by EU leaders and human rights groups.
Lukashenko maintains a tight grip. The media is completely muzzled and over 1,300 political prisoners remain in jail, many for the crime of sending food to prisoners. Some half a million people who left the country in the wake of a 2020 crackdown which followed mass protests were deprived of a vote, as was the 3.5 million diaspora.
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Getting an accurate read on political opinion in Belarus is difficult, but a recent survey by British research group Chatham House records widespread dissatisfaction with the sanctions-crippled economy – imposed over Belarus support for Russia in Ukraine – while only 32 per cent said they approved of the Russian invasion.
