Tensions mount between Belarus dictator and Kremlin
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Spring showdown looms in Belarus - Atlantic Council
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Lukashenko s long rule over Belarus looks set to survive 2020. What about 2021?
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Protests against Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus / AP
With opposition leader forced to flee to Lithuania, what does the future for Belarus hold? Radio Free Europe reports.
Ever since he came to power in 1994, Alexander Lukashenko has used controlled elections and other levers at his disposal to prolong his own power and to restrain or eliminate rivals in some cases literally, according to those who believe he was behind the unsolved disappearances of several opponents.
The August 9 presidential election that handed the 66-year-old former state-farm manager a sixth straight term was no exception, with the most viable potential challengers barred from the ballot and in some cases jailed all but one, in fact, who was apparently deemed no threat.
Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya had attracted larger and larger crowds as the election neared, however, making the official result 10 percent for Tsikhanouskaya, 80 percent for the incumbent an absurd lie in the eyes of many Belarusians. So they took to the streets.
Many were already dismayed by the government s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, with hospitals ill-equipped to handle the onslaught from a pandemic Lukashenka dismissed as a mass psychosis.
Hundreds of thousands of people have protested in Minsk, in the western cities of Brest and Hrodna, and elsewhere for many months now by far the biggest wave of demonstrations in Belarus since it gained independence in the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.