Belarus’s Rogue Strongman Is Pushing His Luck
A year after a disputed election that set off dramatic protests, Alexander Lukashenko is reaching across borders to cause trouble. It’s a strategy born of desperation.
They’re not going anywhere.
Photographer: Stringer/AFP via Getty Images
Once a regime has plucked a commercial airliner out of the sky to snatch a single journalist, its capacity to shock the rest of the world should theoretically diminish. And yet, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has managed. At home, he has brutally suppressed civil society and critics, with one would-be adversary from 2020’s presidential race sentenced to 14 years in jail. He’s weaponized migrants. This week alone, he forced an Olympic athlete to flee after she dared criticize a sporting decision, and put an opposition leader on trial behind closed doors, even as a high-profile diaspora activist was found dead under suspicious circumstances in a Ukrainian park.
A year after a disputed election that triggered unprecedented street protests, Lukashenko hangs on to power. Yet his increasingly erratic and outrageous tactics speak to his diminishing options — and to the impossible position he has put the country in. He has backed a nation of more than nine million at the heart of Europe into political and geographic isolation, squeezed by economic sanctions and dependent on neighboring Russia like never before.