The senior American diplomat slipped quietly into Belarus, a police state run by a strongman reviled for decades in the West, traveling by car across the border for meetings with President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko and the head of his KGB security apparatus. It was Mr. Lukashenko’s first meeting with a senior State Department official in…
Europe’s longest-serving leader, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, cruised to his seventh election victory in a row on Sunday in a contest that his exiled opponents dismissed as a sham, whose only purpose was to cement his autocratic grip on the former Soviet republic, Russia’s closest ally. “Don’t use the word election to describe…
When Aleksandr G. Lukashenko last ran for president of Belarus, the former Soviet republic he has led since 1994, he faced an unusual phenomenon: rival candidates who actually tried to win. His eventual victory in that election, in 2020, widely regarded as fraudulent, was met with nationwide protests, a subsequent brutal crackdown supported by Russia…