On 14 October, a squad of masked riot policemen raided an antifascist concert in Minsk, detaining dozens of people, and reportedly beating some of them. This incident, among several others, demonstrated a relatively new trend in Belarusian domestic politics....
On 9 October, Belarusian media reported that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenka received an invitation to the Eastern Partnership (EaP) summit in Brussels. The development demonstrates a new high in the pragmatisation of EU policy towards Minsk. A formal end...
Recently Belarus was considered a relative success story of the Eastern Partnership – no territorial disputes, no broken promises, only gradual positive dynamic in relations with the European Union (EU). However, the intensity of Belarus-EU cooperation seems to have reached...
American human rights watchdog Freedom House in its most recent global report has ranked Belarus in the bottom ten countries in the world in terms of media freedom. Scoring more poorly than some of the world's worst dictatorships in...
Head of the Belarusian Central Electoral Commission Lydziia Yarmoshina on 20 April instructed activists of the Belaya Rus public association on the novelties of the upcoming parliamentary campaign. When asked why she picked this particular organisation for a briefing, Yarmoshina...
Federika Mogherini, the EU's chief diplomat, has denied that Brussels lifted sanctions against Belarus on geopolitical grounds. Anonymously, EU officials, on the contrary, have confirmed that the decision embodied the victory of pragmatism in Brussels. For the EU, democracy in...
Following the full-scale fragmentation after the 2015 presidential election campaign, the Belarusian opposition is starting to unite. Tatsiana Karatkevich, currently quite popular in polls, is rounding up her supporters to enter the 2016 parliamentary elections. Centre-right parties have formed a...
On 9 September the EU High Commissioner for Foreign Policy Federica Mogherini stated that the EU should "not to miss a new window of opportunity" in relations with Belarus after Alexander Lukashenka's decision to pardon six remaining political prisoners. Although...
Just as before the 2010 presidential elections the Belarusian authorities show certain signs of liberalisation. They do not use aggressive hostile propaganda on TV and have allowed the opposition to campaign without interference. In addition, Alexander Lukashenka held a press-conference...
Each and every election in Belarus follows a straightforward pattern: limit the rights of the opposition, control the vote-counting process and, later, announce the predetermined winner. However, the 2015 campaign will differ from previous ones in a number of...
Belarusians are really beginning to worry about their domestic state of economic affairs more than Ukraine as of late. This is the main result of a December 2014 poll from the Independent Institute of Socio-Economic and Political Studies (IISEPS) published in early...
On 11-12 August the Belarusian authorities announced three upcoming legislative initiatives – all intended to complicate the life of state officials. They include a new anti-corruption law, an abrupt reduction in the number of civil servants and a presidential decree,...
Late in the evening on 29 July Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko phoned his Belarusian counterpart and proposed him to host a meeting of a tripartite contact group on Ukraine. The negotiations' format included OSCE, Russia and Ukraine. Alexander Lukashenka...
On 24 June Aliaksandr Lukashenka, on a visit to defence industry enterprises in Barysau, said that his personal major priority is maintaining the security of the state. The Ukrainian crisis demonstrated that a state can preserve military security only if...
On 24 February the coordinator of the "Human Rights Defenders for Free Elections" initiative Valiantsin Stefanovich called the upcoming 23 March 2014 local elections in Belarus "an invisible campaign." His point is not without merit, when considering the total passiveness, apathy...