Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Aibek Smadiyarov said on January 22 that Kremlin-friendly Russian journalist Tina Kandelaki has been banned from entering the country over a post she made online, alleging that the Russian language was being discriminated against in the Central Asian nation.
The trial in absentia of six former law enforcement officers who left Belarus after taking the side of protesters in 2020 challenging the official results of a presidential election that named authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka the winner began behind closed doors on January 22.
Ukraine and Poland will be able to resolve problematic issues between the two countries, including matters relating to recent Polish border protests, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.
Two years after a presidential election brought Belarus to the brink of revolution, RFE/RL’s Belarus Service has launched a deep-digging podcast series that provides stark insights into the state clampdown that staved off the challenge from an unprecedented democratic opposition movement.
Innovative opposition defies Belarus dictator Lukashenka
The Belarus People’s Assembly in Minsk on February 11-12 was a retro
neo-Soviet affair. With the pomp and circumstance of a 1970s-vintage Communist Party Congress, strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka
assailed six months of protests against his autocratic regime as a Western-controlled “rebellion” to a room of nearly 3,000 handpicked loyalists under a banner reading Unity! Development! Independence!
Days earlier, on February 7, cities in Europe and North America marked Solidarity With Belarus Day
at the request of exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya with a series of
creative and innovative public displays. These included a drone in Kyiv carrying the flag of the pre-Soviet Republic of Belarus; the facade of the Estonian parliament in Tallinn and the skies over the Latvian capital Riga lit up in red and white; and a giant flag unfurled and carried down the streets of Gdansk, Poland. Tsikhanouskaya also la