Since 2020, Lukashenka has Made Belarus Ever Less Free But Still Unbowed, ‘Novaya Gazeta’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 8 – Five years ago this week, hundreds of thousands of Belarusians went into the streets to protest against Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s falsification of the elections to keep himself in power. That did not lead to his overthrow but rather prompted him to take steps to make Belarus ever more “unfree,” Nadezhda Chernyavskaya says.

            The Novaya Gazeta journalist says that as the result of the flight of hundreds of thousands, the incarceration of thousands, and the deaths of a smaller number, Belarusians today are “hostage to a dictator, to Russia and to fear.” But despite that, the Belarusian people remain unbowed (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/08/08/strana-zalozhnikov).

            The Belarus of 2025, she says, is “a country where fear lives in each household, where for a like or commentary on the internet one can land in prison, where for ‘an incorrect’ color of clothes … one can be threatened with real sentences, and where people are afraid to make friends” lest they make the wrong ones.

            As a result of what can only be described as “a war against his own people,” Lukashenka has returned Belarus to what it was in 1937 under Stalin; but he has done it so “slowly” that many have failed to recognize what he has done and is doing and seem to think that the new normal there is something other than what it is.

            Lukashenka made this “turn to totalitarianism” thanks to Putin who five years ago saved him. It was the Kremlin leader’s support “financial and forceful” which gave the Belarusian dictator “the chance to remain on the throne,” a chance he has exploited to repress his people as a means of keeping in power.

            Within Belarus, Chernyavskaya says, there is “an oppressive quiet. Many live with the feeling that Belarus remains alone, one on one with an ever more bestial Leviathan, who will continue to persecute the people in order to remain power.” But that is not the end of the story, even if Lukashenka’s and Putin’s repressions have pushed that end into the future.

            “The memory of freedom is not dead and the idea of change lives on, albeit in deep underground or in exile,” she writes. “The thousands of political prisoners are not just victims. They are also symbols of resilience and sparks of hope. Evidence of that comes from prisoners who on their release are not afraid to testify about torture, call for struggle and do not give up.”

            That sets Lukashenka’s Belarus apart from Stalin’s Russia, and this difference does not bode well for his survival or the survival of his system, however much Putin helps – and however much people in the West assume that the Belarusian dictator will beat the odds and defeat the desire of the Belarusian people for a different outcome.