MINSK / MOSCOW (Reuters) – The Belarusian government on Monday arrested two opposition figures and summoned a Nobel Prize winner to interrogate him, a day after thousands of people challenged the army to march to call for the fall of President Alexander Lukashenko.
Two weeks after an election, his wary parties say they manipulated, Lukashenko has shown little sign of ending the protests, the risk to his 26-year reign.
The president, who called the protesters “rats,” said last week that he had ordered police to end all protests in Minsk, but tens of thousands of people took to the streets on Sunday at one of the largest demonstrations since the election and dispersed. Peacefully.
In a sign of the danger of an already fragile economy, several banking resources told Reuters that the top banks had run out of foreign currency to meet the growing demand for citizens seeking to sell the Belarusian ruble.
A board member of Belarus’ central bank told Reuters that the technical challenge involved the physical availability of banknotes and did not report liquidity problems.
A spokesman for the Coordinating Council, an opposition framework established last week, told Reuters that two of its top members, Olga Kovalkova and Sergei Dylevsky, were arrested on Monday near the entrance of a factory.
Meanwhile, Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich was subpoenaed for questioning state investigators on a criminal case opposed to the Council, the spokesperson said, and will meet with them on Wednesday.
Alexievich, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a member of the Council, which was created with the stated goal of selling a nonviolent authority movement and includes dozens of public figures, adding the former chief of the main state drama.
The government has launched an investigation of criminals, calling the council illegal to take power. Many opposition figures are in crime or have fled the country.
“Belarus has done so and the government will have to communicate with us,” one of the council members Maria Kolesnikova told reporters.
CURRENCY SHORTAGE
Central bank board member Dmitri Murin told Reuters that any currency shortage in exchange issues “has a technical nature: there is a challenge with the physical availability of banks. Banks have a shortage of liquidity in currency right now. “
Bank resources described what appears to be a severe currency shortage despite an injection of liquidity last week.
“There is panic now, the demand for liquidity in foreign currency is very high,” a forex trader in Minsk told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“The only bank with liquidity (foreign) is Raiffeisen Bank, which sold it very actively last week. But the last coin plane arrived in Belarus last Friday. Our bank and others sought to buy foreign currencies today, but Raiffeisen said yes. I don’t have any. “
A spokesman for Priorbank, Raiffeisen’s Minsk subsidiary, declined to comment.
A source from a Belarusian state bank told Reuters that his bank had won consumer applications to withdraw $2. 5 million, but had $100,000 in its coffers.
Another user of a unit of a Russian bank said that withdrawals had to be requested several days in advance and that there was no guarantee that they would be granted.
On the official market, the Belarusian ruble fell about 1% against the euro and the dollar on Monday, against the euro, to an all-time high.
(Graphic: Belarusian ruble, https://fingfx. thomsonreuters. com/gfx/mkt/bdwvkzdoxpm/belarus. PNG)
FINANCIAL CRISIS
The weak currency would do more to serve $2. 5 billion in debt payments until the end of 2020. The central bank had less than 3 months of import policy until the end of 2019, according to World Bank estimates.
“It is very transparent that there is a large shortage of currencies and, of course, it is one of the countries that already has low foreign exchange reserves,” said David Hauner, head of emerging multi-asset market strategy for EMEA. Bank of Global Research in America. “. . . . The country has a lot of mattress to deal with this kind of disorder during an extended era. “
(Chart: Belarus import canopy, https://fingfx. thomsonreuters. com/gfx/mkt/nmovaqjnjva/Pasted symbol 1598267679735. png)
Viber Rakuten’s chief executive, who manages the Viber courier service, quoted Interfax as saying the company is contemplating avoiding investments in Belarus, Djamel Agaoua, said workers had been transferred from Minsk to remote locations.
Belarus is the former Soviet state with the closest political, economic and cultural ties to Russia, and its territory is considered very important to Russia’s European defense strategy, leaving the Kremlin with the selection to continue Lukashenko as his authority collapses.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Sunday that Belarusian protesters were seeking a crisis and a “bloodbath” in Venezuela rather than a non-violent resolution.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Lukashenko spoke on Monday on their third call in just 10 days, setting the stage in Belarus and agreeing that Belarusians would participate in russian coronavirus vaccine trials.
Western countries have had to balance their sympathy for a fledgling pro-democracy movement with the concern of provoking Moscow. Undersecretary of state Stephen Biegun met on Monday with opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya in Lithuania, and is scheduled to talk about the Belarusian holiday in Russia.
“She’s a very impressive user and I can see why she’s so popular in her country,” Biegun said. “The aim of the assembly is to listen, listen to what other Belarusians think and see what they are doing to unload the right to self-determination. “
(Report through Andrey Ostroukh in MOSCOW and Andrei Makhovsky in MINSK; Additional report via Andrey Kuzmin and Tom Balmforth in MOSCOW and Karin Strohecker in LONDON; Written through Katya Golubkova; Edited through Sujata Rao, Peter Graff, William Maclean)
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