Inauguration into Dictatorship
On 23 September 2020, Alexander Lukashenko was inaugurated for the sixth time as the unchallenged President of the Republic of Belarus. Although the ceremony was formally conducted in accordance with the country's constitution, the Belarusian opposition and the international community consider Lukashenko a "self-proclaimed" president who has usurped power in his country.
The events of 2020–21 proved to be truly dramatic for the Belarusian people, who had hoped for democratic change in their country but instead faced the brutal suppression of peaceful protests and the final cementing of Belarus in Russia's geopolitical wake—as a future staging ground for the planned full-scale invasion of Ukraine and as a pocket "proxy dictatorship" through which nuclear blackmail could be exerted not only on Ukraine but also on neighbouring European Union countries.
Mass protests began across Belarus following the presidential election on 9 August 2020, in which, according to "official" data, Alexander Lukashenko won over 80% of the votes. Given Lukashenko's low approval rating as he entered another term and the rising popularity of the opposition presidential candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, it was evident to the public that the election results had been falsified. Belarusian protesters demanded that the Central Election Commission of Belarus recount the votes or declare the election results invalid. However, the Commission found no grounds for a recount and refused to provide copies of the precinct commission protocols detailing the election results.
The peaceful standoff between the protesters and the Belarusian OMON (Special Purpose Police Unit), the KGB, and Russian security forces, who had been brought into the country specifically to suppress the protests, quickly escalated into violent clashes, crackdowns, and arrests of protest participants, who were subsequently subjected to torture and beatings. Unfortunately, the Belarusian society was unprepared to respond forcefully, and the peaceful protest was predictably drowned in blood and crushed.
The fact that both Lukashenko and Putin, who backed him, were fully aware that they were seizing power in the country solely through administrative resources and election fraud is evident from the secrecy surrounding Lukashenko's inauguration in the Palace of Independence. The ceremony was held with no public announcement. A president who fears his people and takes an oath in the presence of loyal civil servants and heads of security agencies was inaugurated for a sixth term, which eventually led the peaceful republic to become an accomplice in the war crimes of its "elder brother," the Russian Federation.
Despite the official inauguration, authorities in Ukraine, the United States, Canada, the Baltic countries, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Poland, Germany, and the Netherlands issued statements refusing to recognise Lukashenko as the legitimate president.
What was the ultimate outcome of the Belarusian opposition's defeat and Lukashenko's victory? For example, it led to the violation of one of the fundamental agreements on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. In February 2022, a reference to Belarus’s non-nuclear status was removed from the constitution following a referendum. In March 2023, the Russian dictator Putin announced that he had agreed with President Lukashenko to deploy tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory—allegedly in response to a statement by the UK’s Deputy Defence Minister about the intention to supply Ukraine with depleted uranium shells (which are not, in fact, related to nuclear weapons in any way).
Moreover, Belarus had made its territory and infrastructure available to the Russian aggressor’s troops long before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Joint military exercises, "Union Resolve 2022," were used as a pretext for the concentration of forces. Local residents of the Brest, Gomel, and Minsk regions observed and photographed a large number of Russian ground military equipment and aviation, some marked with "V" and "O" signs. At the end of February 2022, even Lukashenko himself admitted that Russian troops were launching missile strikes on Ukraine from Belarusian territory, allegedly for "preventative purposes" to avoid a ground operation and "mass slaughter." As of 3 March 2022, more than 70 missile launches against Ukraine had been conducted from Belarusian territory, according to Pentagon data. In nearly three years of the Russia-Ukraine war, the list of war crimes in which the self-proclaimed dictator Lukashenko has entangled his country has grown a thousandfold.
In 2024, at the Munich Security Conference, Belarusian leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya spoke at a roundtable on Belarus, stating in particular:
"We need to isolate both dictators (Lukashenko and Putin – The Gaze), deprive them of resources, and make them pay for every crime—against Ukrainians, against Belarusians, against international peace and order."
Although Alexander Lukashenko, under the wing of the two-headed Russian eagle and the "Iskanders" armed with tactical nuclear weapons deployed in Belarus, may currently consider himself safe, he should remember that all power is finite, and the power of dictators usually ends on the defendant’s bench, with an inglorious death in a besieged bunker, in an unmarked ditch on the bayonets of insurgents, or from the "Novichok" poison thoughtfully provided by "strategic partners" from Russia's FSB. The biographies of Hitler, Ceaușescu, Mussolini, Gaddafi, and other tyrants bear eloquent testimony to this. Alexander Lukashenko would do well to reread their histories to understand the fate that awaits him.