Belarus Ruler Moves to Crush Opposition in Sweep Against Leaders

(Bloomberg) -- A sweeping crackdown on opposition leaders in Belarus has left nearly all the main organizers of anti-government protests in detention or exile, as President Alexander Lukashenko seeks to crush the biggest challenge yet to his 26-year rule.

With Lukashenko preparing to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow soon, his campaign targeting major figures in the opposition coordination council left only Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich at liberty and in Belarus as of Wednesday. European diplomats hurried to her side after she wrote that masked men had appeared outside her home in the capital Minsk.

Maria Kalesnikava, the most senior opposition leader still in Belarus, is being held in a detention center in Minsk after she thwarted the authorities’ attempt to force her out of the country, council spokesman Gleb Germanchuk said by phone. The embattled opposition lost contact with lawyers Maksim Znak and Ilya Saley, who were targeted in separate raids Wednesday, he said.

Lukashenko rules out talks with opposition leaders and has blamed Western powers for the unrest that erupted over his claims to a landslide 80% victory in the Aug. 9 presidential election. He’s turned to Putin for support and the two leaders are due to hold talks in Moscow in coming days.

The president “has been gradually cranking up repression” against senior figures in the opposition coordinating council, said Artyom Shraibman, founder of Minsk-based political consultancy Sense Analytics. “The country hasn’t responded to previous arrests of council presidium members with new spikes in protest activity so the authorities just carried on.”

The European Union and the U.S. are threatening sanctions against Lukashenko’s regime over the suppression of opponents and for police brutality against protesters who continue to turn out in huge numbers against him. The warnings have done little so far to deter him.

Opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who says she beat Lukashenko in the election, said the crackdown showed the president “is afraid of negotiations and thus tries to paralyze the work of the coordinating council and intimidate its members.”

Tsikhanouskaya, who fled to Lithuania days after the election, held talks with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in Warsaw on Wednesday.

Contact with Znak was lost after he notified Germanchuk that “someone came to visit us” and sent a text message “masks,” the spokesman said by phone.

Kalesnikava’s whereabouts had been mostly unknown since she was seized by masked people in Minsk on Monday. She ripped up her passport and jumped from the window of a vehicle on the border with Ukraine during an attempt to expel her from the country with council spokesman Anton Radniankou and executive secretary Ivan Krautsou on Tuesday. Radniankou and Krautsou are now in Ukraine.

‘Kidnapping Our Country’

The authorities accuse the detained opposition figures of seeking to seize power illegally, according to lawyers, something they deny.

“First, they kidnapped our country, now they are abducting the best of us,” Alexievich said on the website of PEN International’s Belarusian chapter, of which she’s president. “We weren’t preparing a coup. We wanted to prevent a split in our country. We wanted a dialog to begin in society.”

Lukashenko dismissed the calls for dialog in an interview to four Russian media outlets broadcast Wednesday. “You probably know that if Lukashenko collapsed now, the whole system would collapse and Belarus would follow,” he said.

His attempts to force opposition leaders abroad “won’t kill the protests,” Tsikhanouskaya said. “We are self-organized and everyone in Belarus wants changes, the authorities won’t be able to expel everyone.”

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