Mar. 13, 2025 |
Lukashenka strikes back. This January, the president of Belarus, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, secured his seventh term with 87 percent of the vote. A big win, if true. But even if it isn’t, something has changed since the last election in 2020, when about 300,000 people took to the streets to protest falsified election results. Back then, when Lukashenka visited the Minsk Wheels Tractor Plant, the workers heckled him, telling him to resign. The European Union and the United Kingdom refused to recognize the result and the EU imposed sanctions.
During this election campaign, he visited the Minsk Automobile Plant, where a BBC reporter said he was greeted with “rapturous applause.” That may not be representative of wider sentiment in Belarus, but still, it is telling: The opposition seems resigned, at least for the moment. Why?
In this week’s member’s despatch, we explore this question with a look at Paul Hansbury’s Belarus in Crisis: From Domestic Unrest to the Russia-Ukraine War—a primer on Belarusian history and society, as well as an in-depth analysis of Belarus’s current affairs. It’s a murky subject, shot through with official obfuscation, but Hansbury sifts through the evidence like a detective …
—Gustav Jönsson
