Mass protests and a brutal crackdown<\/p>\n
What followed was the biggest and most sustained protest movement in Belarusian history. On August 16, 2020, at least 100,000 people \u2014 by some counts over 200,000 \u2014 packed central Minsk<\/a>, dwarfing a rival pro-government rally the regime had bussed factory workers in to attend. These pro-democracy rallies were bigger than those in 1991 during the collapse of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n Unlike the armed uprisings and tribal power struggles that have periodically toppled governments elsewhere in the former Soviet Union \u2014 Kyrgyzstan’s repeated revolutions being the clearest contrast, driven by a north-south elite power struggle rather than genuine democratic demand<\/a> \u2014 the Belarusian protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, leaderless and cut across class lines. Tikhanovskaya was out of the country, but control of the tens of thousands on the street became an amorphous \u201crevolution by committee<\/a>\u201d as information flowed over the Telegram channel Nexta allowing the crowds to respond to and avoid clashing with the security forces, Nexta\u2019s leadership told IntelliNews at the time<\/a>. The demonstrations became a living headless organism that defied Lukashenko every effort to crush the protests.<\/p>\n The most vivid image of that peacefulness was the weekly \u201cBanshees of Belarus<\/a>\u201d all-women marches, thousands of shrieking women dressed in white linking arms to shield men from riot police, a tactic the security forces struggled to counter with their usual violence.<\/p>\n The movement’s most enduring symbol, though, was a 78-year-old retired geologist, Nina Bahinskaya<\/a>, who had been walking the streets of Minsk with the banned white-red-white opposition flag since the late Soviet era; when police confronted her in 2020 and accused her of an unauthorised demonstration, her curt reply \u2014 \u201cI’m taking a walk\u201d (\u042f \u0433\u0443\u043b\u044f\u044e) \u2014 became a rallying cry repeated at protests across the country. She was still being hit with new criminal charges for it as recently as last year and has been lumbered with impossibly large fines she cannot hope to pay out of her tiny state pension.<\/p>\n In one famous occasion, she was detained by an OMON riot police officer, literally twice her size. After leaping up to try and pull his mask off, and failing, she resorted to viciously kicking him in the shins until his colleagues had to drag her off. In another occasion, after she had been detained and finally released at dusk, a sheepish security officer came up to her and returned her red and white flag, with which she is never without. \u201cHere, I know how important this is to you,\u201d he said, underscoring the universal respect in which she is held by all Belarusians, including some in the security forces.<\/p>\n The regime’s answer to peaceful protest was brutal repression: tens of thousands detained, many beaten, raped and tortured in overcrowded detention centres in the crackdown’s first days alone. A few were died of their injuries, and hundreds of thousands of Belarusians ultimately fled the country. Roughly 100 Belarusians have since gone on to fight and die for Ukraine against Russia, according to Visegrad 24 \u2014 a measure of how directly the crushed 2020 revolution fed into today’s war.<\/p>\n Lukashenko’s “Ceausescu moment”<\/p>\n The turning point that came closest to actually unseating Lukashenko, a former collective farm boss, on August 17, 2020, when Lukashenko personally addressed workers at the MZKT truck factory in Minsk \u2014 traditionally a bastion of regime support \u2014 and was heckled to his face with chants of \u201cget out.\u201d He left looking visibly shaken<\/a>, in a moment pundits immediately dubbed his \u201cCeausescu moment\u201d \u2014 an echo of the Romanian dictator’s fatal on-camera loss of control over a crowd in 1989. A general strike wave followed, spreading through state-owned enterprises that collectively accounted for more than a quarter of Belarusian GDP, and for a few days it looked like the workers who had always underpinned Lukashenko’s rule might bring it down.<\/p>\n It never reached critical mass. Strike organisers were arrested, workers were threatened with dismissal and blacklisting, and \u2014 decisively \u2014 Putin stepped in on August 27, 2020 with a public offer to send a Russian \u201cspecial military unit\u201d to quell the unrest \u201cif necessary\u201d \u2013 the key phrase that turned the tide of the protests.<\/p>\n Backed by that guarantee, Lukashenko regained his nerve, doubled down on repression rather than negotiating a transition, and the strike movement collapsed within weeks. The price of that rescue was Belarus’s independence in all but name: from that point on, Lukashenko owed his survival to the Kremlin, a debt he is still paying down in Russian soldiers’ staging grounds and drone-guidance relay stations today.<\/p>\n A dictator entrenched, an opposition adrift<\/p>\n Lukashenko was duly inaugurated for a sixth term in 2020 and, despite a Western-led non-recognition campaign, sailed to a seventh in a January 2025 election dismissed by observers as a foregone conclusion<\/a>, with most credible rivals dead, imprisoned or in exile. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Belarus has hosted Russian troops, missiles and \u2014 this year \u2014 has been accused by Kyiv of allowing its territory to be used to relay signals guiding Russian drone and missile strikes into northern Ukraine.<\/p>\n That last point brought a striking shift in Kyiv’s posture this summer: President Volodymyr Zelenskiy publicly warned Belarus on June 19 that it had one week to dismantle the relay equipment<\/a> \u201cor we will do it ourselves\u201d \u2014 an overt threat to strike Belarusian territory, including its two cash cow oil refineries, that marked a break from four years of Kyiv treating Minsk as an unwilling accomplice rather than an active belligerent. Lukashenko switched the relays off, then was summoned to an unscheduled two-day meeting with Putin at Valdai, from which no readout was issued.<\/p>\n Meanwhile the opposition in exile has fractured over strategy. Maria Kolesnikova<\/a>, freed after five years in jail as part of a prisoner-release deal, has argued Brussels should now engage Lukashenko directly given his openness to \u201chumanitarian steps\u201d in exchange for eased sanctions; Tikhanovskaya has pushed back publicly, insisting sanctions and isolation are still working<\/a> and that \u201cLukashenko is ready to release his biggest enemies just to get rid of sanctions.\u201d<\/p>\n Lukashenko’s Trump card<\/p>\n What has actually moved the needle on sanctions is not Brussels but Washington. Since mid-2025 Lukashenko has run a charm offensive on Donald Trump, trading political prisoners for sanctions relief in instalments<\/a> \u2014 the same transactional playbook, one Belarusian analyst noted, that he has long used on Putin, \u201cidentifying the senior partner’s soft spots and then massaging them with flattery.\u201d Trump has called Lukashenko \u201ca highly respected president\u201d and \u201ca great leader\u201d on Truth Social in the process.<\/p>\n The releases have been substantial: 123 prisoners freed in December 2025 in exchange for Washington lifting sanctions on Belaruskali, the state potash producer that is Lukashenko’s single biggest source of foreign currency<\/a> (potash accounted for 20% of the global market and $2.5bn in export revenue, or 4% of GDP, before 2021 sanctions hit); a further 250 freed in March 2026 as the US eased sanctions on two state banks, the finance ministry and the national carrier Belavia<\/a>; and by early August 2026 more than 450 political prisoners had been released in total, with Belarus publicly confirming it was moving to implement a fresh set of US proposals<\/a>.<\/p>\n Among those freed was Sergei Tikhanovsky himself \u2014 Tikhanovskaya’s husband, whose arrest in 2020 was what put her on the ballot in the first place \u2014 released last summer after a visit to Minsk by a US envoy. Prominent former presidential candidate Viktor Babariko, protest leader Maria Kolesnikova, Nobel laureate Ales Bialiatski and Tut.by editor Maryna Zolatava were among the others freed in the December 2025 batch, most of them deported directly to Ukraine or Lithuania on release.<\/p>\n Six years after the stolen election that was meant to end his rule, Lukashenko has instead converted Belarus’s political prisoners into his most valuable bargaining chip with Washington even as he keeps the country locked into Russia’s war machine \u2014 a dictator entrenched by the very crisis that should have removed him, running down a clock that a scattered and now divided opposition-in-exile has no obvious way to stop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Six years ago on August 9 2020, Belarusians went to the polls in a presidential election that Alexander…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4929,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2013,32,2017,1914,2018,1968,2016,2014,34,2015,71,1167],"class_list":["post-4928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-2020-election","tag-belarus","tag-belarus-anniversary","tag-belarus-crackdown","tag-belarus-democracy","tag-belarus-protests","tag-belarus-ukraine","tag-belarusian-opposition","tag-lukashenko","tag-putin-belarus","tag-sviatlana-tsikhanouskaya","tag-tikhanovskaya"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/belarus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n