Belarus won’t divide by ethnic origin the blood spilt by the Nazis: Belarusian, Jewish, Russian, Tatar, Ukrainian. The 800,000 Jews killed in WWII are part of the genocide against Belarus, our common home
Alyaksandr Lukashenka
(Source: The Atlantic Council).
On July 6, a Belarusian court handed a 14-year prison sentence to Victor Babariko (BelTA, July 6), perhaps President Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s strongest political rival. Babariko was arguably best positioned to actually win a would-be free and fair presidential election against the incumbent, if he had been allowed to run last year (see EDM, June 10, 23, July 29, 2020). Under some other circumstances, the allegations leveled against Babariko, including that he took huge bribes while in charge of a bank for 20 years, might have been worthy of serious scrutiny. But when the major rival of a sitting president is arrested less than two months before the election, the notion that the prosecutorial decision was made for any reason other than political considerations, predictably, looks dubious. According to the just-released end-of-April survey by the London-based think tank Chatham House (CH), Babariko continues to be the most popula