Lukashenko refuses to bend as protesters continue to flood the streets in Belarus
MOSCOW — Thousands of protesters on Sunday again flooded into the capital of Belarus and towns across the country, signaling the depth of anger at President Alexander Lukashenko, an iron- fisted leader who, fortified by strong support from Russia, has shown no sign of bending.
The Belarus protests have mobilized large numbers of people for nearly a month, since a disputed presidential election, and have been dominated by calls for Mr. Lukashenko to resign. They have struggled, though, to bend the will of an authoritarian leader who has rejected all compromise and scorned his critics as “rats,” “tricksters” and “traitors.”
The crowd on Sunday in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, appeared to be as large as those on three previous Sundays, when more than 100,000 people gathered to protest what they believe was a blatantly rigged presidential election on Aug. 9 and to demand that the declared victor, Mr. Lukashenko, cede power.
Defying government warnings, protesters in Minsk paraded up to lines of riot police officers blocking major avenues, shouting, “Shame!” and “Go away.” They waved red and white flags, which served as the national flag until Mr. Lukashenko replaced it 25 years ago — a year after he took office — with a more Soviet- looking standard.
Smaller protests were reported in Brest, a city in the west on the border with Poland; Grodno, a hotbed of opposition sentiment in the northwest; Gomel, a town in the southeast near Russia where Mr. Lukashenko has staged a number of pro- government rallies; and several other towns.
In an effort to reduce the size of the protests in Minsk, authorities sealed off streets in the city’s center, shut down metro stations and deployed large groups of riot police officers. They arrested scores of people but mostly refrained from the heavy- handed violence that was seen when the protests began last month.
The number of demonstrators in Minsk and elsewhere gave weight to an assertion Friday by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Mr. Lukashenko’s main rival in the disputed election, who said that “it is impossible to force the people to back down,” and that the protest movement had “reached the point of no return.”
But it is unclear how Ms. Tsikhanouskaya, who fled to neighboring Lithuania after challenging the election result, and other opposition leaders can force Mr. Lukashenko to bow to public anger over his claims of a reelection landslide.
The Belarusian government, calculating that it can sap the energy of the protest movement by removing its leaders, has arrested most of Mr. Lukashenko’s most outspoken opponents and forced others to leave the country.