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. leading an offensive against nonviolent protesters.
On Friday morning, the EU will impose sanctions on some 40 public officials, with the exception of President Alexander Lukashenko, who was re-elected in August in a vote that the opposition considers manipulated.
In response, the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a pronouncement of its own sanctions opposed to European officials. “The Belarusian side, as of today, is implementing a list of retaliatory sanctions,” he said. not provide main points about the number of public servers in the list.
If the EU increases the “sanctions wheel” more, there may be “more serious consequences,” according to the communiqué, such as Belarus’s withdrawal from joint programmes and projects or the revision of its diplomatic relations with the bloc.
The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in the centre, departs from an EU summit in the construction of the European Council in Brussels on Friday 2 October 2020. European Union leaders met to discuss a variety of foreign affairs problems ranging from Belarus to Turkey and tensions in the eastern Mediterranean (Photo AP / John Thys, Pool)
<< 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.
The official effects of the presidential election on 9 August gave Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus with an iron hand for 26 years, a crushing victory with 80% of the vote, while his main rival, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, only gave him 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 authorities’ brutal reaction to the protests after the vote, with police arresting thousands of people and injuring dozens of people with pores, rubber bullets and deafening grenades, provoked 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, Minsk political analyst Artyom Shraybman told The Associated Press: “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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Daria Litvinova in Moscow contributed to this report.
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