MINSK, Belarus – Belarus’s authoritarian leader on Friday accused NATO of making competitive plans and threatened its neighbors in Lithuania and Poland with counter-sanctions while seeking to consolidate its 26-year government amid weeks of protests against his re-election in an opposition. vote said rigged.
President Alexander Lukashenko, who has led the country’s 9.5 million people in Eastern Europe since 1994 with an iron hand, accused the West of fomenting protests in Belarus in the hope of turning it into an “opposite bridgehead to Russia.”
“They need to overthrow this government and update it with someone else who asks a foreign country to send troops,” he said. “They need our market to sell their products.”
NATO has rejected such earlier claims through Lukashenko. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said this week that the Belarusian leader seeks to evoke the symbol of external forces threatening Belarus as an excuse for his crackdown on opposition, which saw many protesters being beaten by police.
Moreover, the concept that Belarus’s troubled Soviet-style economy would be perceived as a beacon for exporters is challenging existing economic realities. The protests were fuelled by growing weariness over Lukashenko’s reign, his bray rejection of the coronavirus pandemic, and the fatal economic consequences of the epidemic in a country where life criteria were already falling.
The 65-year-old Belarusian leader has threatened to retaliate against its neighbors Poland and Lithuania, which have drastically pushed for ecu trade union sanctions opposing his government. Lithuania also hosted the main opponent of the opposition in the vote, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who settled there after the vote due to pressure from the Belarusian authorities.
Lukashenko said Belarus would retaliate by stopping imports through Lithuanian ports and force its western neighbors to use longer Baltic and Black Sea routes in its industry with Russia and China.
“Let’s see who’s afraid first, we’re going to show them sanctions,” he said. “I have ordered the government to divert all industrial flows from Lithuanian ports. They’ve gone to waste and now we’ll show them their place.
He added that “they were transiting us, but now they will have to pass the Baltic or the Black Sea to the industry with Russia.”
Lithuanian Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis responded on Facebook, saying that if Lukashenko fulfilled his threat, it would basically harm Belarus and its people.
Lukashenko has tried to unleash the protests, it is not easy to resign his resignation as a component of a Western plot opposed to Russia, in order to win Moscow’s support.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Thursday that he was in a position to send police to Belarus if the protests turned violent, but he still did not see such a need.
The wave of protests that followed the 9th presidential election in August said Lukashenko had won a sixth term crushingly in the nine-year presidential election in August and has posed an unprecedented challenge to his reign. The European Union and the United States have stated that the vote is neither loose nor fair.
A fierce crackdown on non-violent protesters in the days after the vote left another 7,000 people arrested, many people injured by police rubber bullets, stun grenades and beatings and at least 3 protesters dead, prompting widespread outrage and forcing the government to turn back. Police stopped interfering with the protests over the next two weeks, but began to disperse demonstrations in recent days, albeit without violence.
On Friday night, a lot of women formed a human chain in a protest in the capital’s independence square. Police arrested hounds and protesters, although many hounds were released with an hour; The Viasna Centre for Human Rights said there were dozens of people in detention in total.
Viasna said 267 others, adding dozens of journalists, were arrested last night when police interrupted a demonstration of about 1,500 people in the square.
Some were released pending court appearances at an unauthorized demonstration. The Interior Ministry said 114 detainees were in custody on Friday.
The EU agreed to impose sanctions on 20 senior Belarusian officials suspected of voter fraud and protester repression and will most likely include Lukashenko on its list at some point, the bloc’s foreign ministers said at an assembly in Berlin on Friday.
In Vienna, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe proposed to mediate between the two parties in Belarus, and President Edi Rama promised not to “interfere in internal affairs” and, at the same time, stressed that human rights violations will have to cease.
Lukashenko rejected the West’s offers of mediation, ignoring the protesters as Western puppets. His main electoral rival fled the country for his safety.
On Friday, many opposition supporters formed “chains of solidarity” in Minsk when the protests entered their 20th day.
“A nonviolent demonstration is more powerful than clubs and fear,” said Maxim Zhurkov, a 30-year-old protester.
The opposition is preparing for a large rally in Minsk on Sunday. Protests around the capital’s main square peaked at around 200,000 during the two Sundays, the most giant demonstrations the country has ever seen.
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Associated Press writers Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow, Lorne Cook in Brussels and David Rising in Berlin contributed.
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