Belarus police crush protests as ruler claims election win

Bloomberg

Riot police detained thousands of protesters in Belarus in clashes after Alexander Lukashenko claimed a landslide victory in presidential elections to extend his 26-year rule amid opposition accusations of massive fraud.
About 3,000 people were held by law enforcement including 1,000 in the capital, Minsk, the Interior Ministry said on Monday in a website statement. Protests took place in 33 cities and towns overnight, and more than 50 citizens and 39 police were injured during confrontations, it said.
Police using water cannon and flash grenades faced crowds of protesters in Minsk after state TV had declared Lukashenko the winner of the vote. One person died and three were injured after a security vehicle hit protesters, the Viasna human rights group said. The Interior Ministry said nobody died during the disturbances.
Lukashenko won 80.2% against 9.9% for the main opposition challenger, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the Central Election Commission reported on Monday. Turnout was 84%, it said. Belarus’s dollar-denominated debt due in 2031 fell for the third straight day on Monday, pushing the yield to 6.87%, the highest this month.
Lukashenko, 65, a former Soviet collective farm boss, had faced unprecedented protests against his rule before the vote, after opposition groups united behind Tikhanovskaya, a 37-year-old former teacher, when other contenders were either jailed or kept off the ballot.
The stay-at-home mother, who ran after her husband Sergei, a political blogger, was detained and barred from the race, drew huge crowds at rallies nationwide.
Tikhanovskaya told reporters at a news conference on Monday that she doesn’t recognise the election results, calling the crackdown on protesters “unacceptable.”
Her election campaign ally Maria Kalesnikava said the opposition was ready for long-term protest. Lukashenko made his first appearance in public since the election, visiting a biotechnology project in Minsk. “There should be only one policy — people,” he said, the state-owned Belta news service reported.
Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Lukashenko on his victory in a telegram and urged the “expansion of integration processes” between their countries, the Kremlin said in a statement on Monday. Chinese President Xi Jinping also sent congratulations, Belta reported.
Poland expressed deep concern about the crushing of the protests and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki called on European Union leaders to hold a snap summit on the crisis.
“Violence against protesters is not the answer,” European Council President Charles Michel tweeted on Monday. “Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, basic human rights must be upheld.”
Observers from the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States said they saw no notable violations in the vote. As protests spread evening in the nation of 9.4 million, sandwiched between Russia and the NATO states of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, Internet access was restricted in Minsk and other cities.
The opposition to Lukashenko will only grow, and may resort to new tactics such as general strikes and blocking government offices, said Sergei Markov, a political consultant to the Kremlin. “The Kremlin wants to see Lukashenko’s relationship with the West sour completely,” he said. Russian nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky said voters had turned against Lukashenko, and “the fate of Yanukovych” awaits the Belarus leader. Zhirinovsky, a deputy speaker in Russia’s parliament, was referring to the Ukrainian president who was ousted in 2014 and fled to Russia after months of mass protests.