On 22 April President Lukashenka delivered his annual address to the nation and parliament. The “phantom” of Ukraine stood behind almost every part of his speech. During his annual address, Lukashenka made some impressive, even revolutionary, statements. He called on...
Yesterday Aliaksandr Lukashenka asked officials to make sure that foreign journalists would face no restrictions on media coverage of the Ice hockey World Championship in May. Next month Minsk will host a major international sports event for the first time in the history of independent Belarus.
Every fourth woman in Belarus has been physically abused by her partner. Just in the last three months, 24 Belarusians have died as a result of domestic violence, a 41% increase from last year. For decades, impunity for such abuse has persisted in Belarus, a country with a traditional view...
Over the last two weeks Belarusian state Channel 1 has regularly covered the protests taking place in the eastern regions of Ukraine. It also commented upon the economic repercussions of the crisis for ordinary Ukrainians and an increase in...
On 9-12 April an exhibition called Holiday 2014 took place in Minsk. Unlike in previous years, people do not appear to be particulary interested in purchasing what are usually popular offers for getaways to Crimea. In the past, almost half a...
The Crimean crisis stirred up a number of comments on the probability of Russian annexation of Belarus. The topic is not completely new. Since the 1990s, fears of Russia taking over Belarus – under pretext of integration process - were one of...
The Kremlin's aggressive actions in Ukraine have scared Minsk. The Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) dreams about its own missile defence system. However, the organisation failed to re-equip even its 20,000-strong rapid reaction force for the past...
20 years ago, Alexander Lukashenka won the presidential elections in Belarus thanks to his anti-corruption slogans. Today he returns the issue into an item of public discourse - last month Lukashenka proclaimed that Ukraine had a revolution because of corruption. Over the last...
The Cost of State (in Belarusian Kosht Urada) project aims to exert civic control over public procurement. The project has noted number of irregularities in public spending. Can bi-lingualism become a cultural development strategy for Belarus? – a topic of a discussion organised in Minsk by...
Belarus Digest is launching Belarus Foreign Policy Digest which will overview the most important foreign policy developments related to Belarus. Igar Gubarevich, who served as Counsellor at the Belarusian embassy in Paris in 2003 - 2006 and held several other...
In the near future Minsk and Beijing plan to sign the main contract for the China-Belarus Industrial Park. Once a project that used to hold great promise, now appears to be a failure. Lately, Belarusian-Chinese relations have gone through...
During the three months of 2014, seven young people in Minsk died from eating blotting paper that contained a synthetic drug. A number of teenagers have also been seriously poisoned and ended up in the hospital in various cities across...
The presidents of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia plan to sign the founding treaty of the Eurasian Economic Union in May 2014. With the signing less than two months ahead, the parties cannot reach a compromise on a number of contested issues, such...
Last week, the Belarusian economic news portal afn.by published a story with the provocative headline “Lukashenka: The Situation with Crimea Allows Belarus to Get its Nuclear Arms Back.” It was, of course, an exaggeration – the original statement lamented over the ineffectiveness of the Budapest...
