KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – The Belarusian government announced Friday that it will apply sanctions against the European Union and threatened to review the country’s diplomacy with the bloc in reaction to EU sanctions against dozens of Belarusian officials accused of falsifying the effects of the presidency. elections and lead an offensive against nonviolent protesters.
Russia said it would also apply Belarusian sanctions to the bloc.
On Friday morning, the EU will impose sanctions on some 40 officials, with the exception of President Alexander Lukashenko, who was re-elected in August in a vote that the opposition considers rigged.
In response, the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a pronouncement of its own sanctions against European officials. “The Belarusian side, as of today, is implementing a list of retaliatory sanctions,” he said. The branch did not disclose the list and did not provide main points about the number of public servants on the list.
If the extra EU increases the “inertia of sanctions”, there may be “more serious consequences”, according to the communiqué, such as Belarus’s withdrawal from joint programmes and projects or the review of its diplomatic relations with the bloc.
<< Belarus still opposes confrontation in word and deed. We are in favor of discussion and understanding. But as a sovereign state, we are also determined, though not without regret, to respond to hostile movements to naturally protect our interests," it reads.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova criticized the EU resolution and said that “the list of Belarusian retaliatory sanctions, which will come into force today, will be used automatically through Russia. “It said that this resolution was in line with the obligations arising from the union. agreement between Belarus and Russia.
On Friday, foreign Ministry spokesman Anatoly Glaz told reporters that Belarus was withdrawing its ambassadors from Poland and Lithuania and called on countries to do the same with their diplomats. diplomats to 14 and Poland from 50 to 18.
Both are neighbors of Belarus and have harshly criticized Lukashenko and the elections.
Glaz also said Belarus would impose cuts on diplomats in Canada and Britain, who last week announced sanctions opposed to Lukashenko and other officials.
The official effects of the presidential election on 9 August gave Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus for 26 years, a crushing victory with 80% of the vote, while his main rival, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, was only given 10%. She and her supporters refused to recognize the effects as valid, and mass protests have rocked Belarus ever since, with thousands of others take to the streets. Lukashenko’s resignation is not easy.
The brutal reaction of the authorities to the protests after the vote, with the police detaining thousands of people and wounding dozens of people with truncheons, rubber bullets and deafening grenades, sparked foreign outrage.
The government reduced violence, but kept the pressure, stopping many protesters and chasing key activists. Many members of the opposition-led Coordination Council to push for a transition of force have been arrested or forced to leave the country.
Tsikhanouskaya has recently gone into exile in Lithuania and her eldest spouse, Maria Kolesnikova, remains in criminal situation for endangering state security, which can result in a five-year criminal sentence if convicted.
The West has a lot of influence on the crisis in Belarus, Told The Associated Press Artyom Shraybman, a Minsk-based political analyst: “Lukashenko doesn’t care about the West’s view of his actions. “
Shraybman called EU sanctions “mild” and symbolic. “EU countries adopt these sanctions only for themselves, in order to demonstrate that they are cynical and that human rights matter to them,” Shraybman said.
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Jim Heintz and Daria Litvinova in Moscow contributed to this report.