MINSK (Reuters) – Belarus said Wednesday that police fired live ammunition at protesters in the city of Brest and arrested more than 1,000 people across the country, intensifying a crackdown that has led the European Union to impose new sanctions on Minsk.
Security forces clashed with the protesters for three consecutive nights after the strongman, President Alexander Lukashenko, won a crushing re-election victory on Sunday in a vote that, according to the parties to the conflict, had been manipulated.
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets on Wednesday. Women dressed in white formed an outdoor human chain at a covered food market in the capital, Minsk, while a crowd also amassed outdoors a criminal where protesters were being held.
Lukashenko sought greater ties with the West amid tense relations with Russia’s classic ally. Brussels lifted sanctions imposed on Lukashenko’s human rights record in 2016, but new measures this week.
A former Soviet collective farm manager, Lukashenko, 65, has Belarus for more than a quarter of a century, but faces anger over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, a slow economy and human rights.
“I have to come to those who faint at night today,” said Elena, a protester speaking outdoors from the covered market. “Not only did my vote be stolen, but 20 years of my life. The approval government will have to be approved.”
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Belarus’s Interior Ministry said 51 protesters and 14 police officers were injured in clashes on Tuesday night.
In Brest, a city in southwestern Belarus on the border with Poland, police fired live ammunition after they said some protesters were armed with steel bars, ignoring the warning shots to the air, the ministry said. An injured user.
Lukashenko has accused the protesters of being in cahoots with foreign backers from Russia and elsewhere.
He said he was unable to recover the van due to COVID-19 restrictions and was not concerned about any foreign plots.
Lukashenko’s rival in Sunday’s vote, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a 37-year-old former English teacher, fled to neighboring Lithuania to register for her children. She suggested to her countrymen that they do not oppose the police and avoid putting their lives at risk.
(Additional report through Anton Zverev and Rinat Sagdiev in Moscow, Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels and Anna Ringstrom in Stockholm; written through Matthias Williams; edited through Gareth Jones)