Foreign plot foiled: Belarus president

Bloomberg

Europe’s longest-serving president said his security forces thwarted a “foreign” plan to foment revolution as protests spread across the country following the arrests of potential challengers to his rule.
“We managed to make some pre-emptive steps and disrupt the large-scale plan to destabilise Belarus,” Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled the post-Soviet nation since 1994, said during a meeting with government officials in the capital, Minsk. “The masks have been torn off not only certain puppets we have here, but also the puppeteers who sit outside Belarus.” He didn’t elaborate on who his authorities saw behind the plot.
Even after his statement, thousands of people lined streets in Minsk and other cities for a second day on Friday to protest the detention of Lukashenko’s opponents, including popular YouTube blogger Sergey Tikhonovskiy
and former banker Viktor Babariko.
More than 100 people were detained across the country, including several journalists, Minsk-based human rights organisation Viasna said on its website. The European Union urged the immediate release of Babariko and his allies, whom local human rights groups called political prisoners.
“An increasingly larger part of Belarusian society is beginning to realise that Lukashenko’s opponents are in a majority,” said Andrei Yeliseyeu, a research director at the Warsaw-based EAST Center. “For many years Belarusian authorities were quite successful at creating a myth about Lukashenko’s electoral majority. Thanks to the growing popularity of new media and messengers like Telegram, access to information among Belarusians has greatly improved.”
Babariko, who is seeking to register as a candidate for the August 9 presidential election, and his son Eduard, who is helping to run his campaign, were detained.