MINSK (Reuters) – At least one user was killed in a clash between Belarusian police and protesters monday after the opposition accused President Alexander Lukashenko of manipulating his victory in re-election amid a refrain of complaints from Western leaders.
Masked police fired tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades and used batons to disperse thousands of people in Minsk on a night of violence. Protesters erected barricades in various spaces and threw Molotov cocktails.
One man died while trying to throw an unidentified explosive device at the police that exploded in his hands, the government said. Local media reported clashes in other cities.
In force for more than a quarter of a century, Lukashenko won a crushing victory over Svetlana Tikhanouskaya, a former English instructor who emerged from obscurity to face the greatest challenge of her reign in years.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the vote is “neither loose nor fair” and condemned “continued violence against protesters and the arrest of opposition supporters.”
The events are heavily monitored across Russia, whose oil exports pass through Belarus to the West and which has long regarded the country as an opposite buffer to NATO. They are also being watched across the West, which has attempted to remove Minsk from Moscow’s orbit.
Germany has asked the European Union to talk about the sanctions opposed to Belarus that were lifted in 2016 to announce greater relations.
Russian President Vladimir Putin used a congratulatory telegram to urge Lukashenko to settle for deeper ties between the two nations, which the Belarusian leader in the past ruled out as an attack on his country’s independence.
Foreign observers have ruled that an election has been lax and fair in Belarus since 1995, and the pre-vote era saw the government imprison Lukashenko’s rivals and open criminal investigations into others who opposed it.
Tikhanouskaya’s electoral rallies have attracted some of the crowds since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Her team was unable to succeed in her over the phone after she left the construction of the electoral commission on Monday. Previously, she told reporters that she saw herself as the election winner.
“The government is not listening to us. The government wants to think of nonviolent tactics to hand over power,” said Tikhanouskaya, who entered the race after her blogger husband was imprisoned. “Of course, we don’t recognize the results.”
“NO REVOLUTION”
The opposition has said it is in a position to contact the authorities. There was no immediate reaction to this offer from Lukashenko, a former Soviet collective farm manager who has kept Belarus under strict control since 1994.
He faces discontent with his control of the economy, the COVID-19 pandemic and human rights violations. But the president has indicated that he will resign.
“We will not allow the country to be torn apart,” the 65-year-old said through the Belta news agency.
Lukashenko repeated accusations that hard-to-understand forces sought to manipulate the protesters he called “sheep” to overthrow him, which he said he would never allow.
“They’re here to orchestrate the chaos,” Lukashenko said. “But I have already warned you: there will be no revolution.”
The EU’s foreign policy leader and his commissioner said the elections were marked by “disproportionate and unacceptable state violence opposed to nonviolent protesters.”
“We condemned the violence and called for the prompt delivery of all (the) detainees last night,” Josep Borrell and Oliver Varhelyi said in a joint statement.
Neighbouring Poland a special EU summit on Belarus.
(Report through Andrei Makhovsky; Additional report through Vladimir Soldatkin in Moscow; Written through Matthias Williams / Andrew Osborn; Edited by Catherine Evans, David Evans, William Maclean and Dan Grebler)
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