br23 blog - minsk, belarus

Right-wing conservative nationalists (КХП БНФ — Conservative Christian Party of the Belarusian National Front) tried to stage a peaceful protest on October square today, in order to express their dissatisfaction with the falsified elections one day before the inauguration of Alexander Lukashenka for a third term.
Several dozens of the conservative Chrisitan party activists came to […]

Milinkevich had to visit a doctor in Strasbourg, at the European Parliament. Actually he didn’t want to, but his companion Vincuk Viachorka (the one that was arrested just before the “elections”) insisted because Milinkevich looked fatigued. The doctors took an EKG and measured blood pressure, and said that EKG looks great, but his blood pressure […]

In order to refresh my (rather mediocre) German reading skills I stopped by the library today and browsed through the last several issues of the biggest German weekly magazine “Spiegel“. I’ve noticed that my vocab has shrunk: I encounter many vaguely familiar words that I can’t quite remember anymore.
By the way, Belarus’ presidential elections, mass […]

Dozens of members of the European Parliament were wearing Belarusian whte-red-white scarfs today, with the inscription “Solidarity with Belarus” in red letters. In the morning the president of the European Parliament gave a warm welcome to Alexander Milinkevich who was also wearing the white-red-white scarf.

Vice-speaker of the EU Parliament talking about Belarus

Bogdan Klich, a well-known […]

During this presidential “election” I was reading William Golding’s Lord of the flies.
The book is essentially about “a bunch of children on deserted island revert to primitive ways.” English-speaking schoolchildren study it in high school and probably remember the main message of the book: the parody on Victorian “Coral island”, the inner corruption of […]

Today Alexander Milinkevich met with the EU president, Austrian Kanzler Wolfgang Schuessel in Wien, Austria. After talking with the EU president Belarus’ opposition leader met with several other Austrian and EU officials, as well as members of the Austrian parliament. The main issue of the talks was to inform EU leadership about the situation in […]

As an April’s Fool Day joke I was thinking of writing a one line entry:
“Lukashenka is dead”
But then I thought that this would be too cruel. It’d be too cruel to the wives of the disappeared politicians. It’d be too cruel to the opposition activists who spent many months or years in jails. It’d be […]

U.S. Department of State actually became interactive in 2006. You can ask them all kinds of questions online. On Monday, April 3, Daniel Fried, Assistant Secretary, chief of European and Eurasian Affairs, will discuss the recent elections in Belarus and Ukraine. You can send your questions now.
I’ve sent this:
Dear Ambassador Fried:
The main reveleation, the main […]

Today, Alexander Milinkevich met with the Polish president Lech Kaczynski and Polish prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz in Warsaw. And this is already second such meeting in the last several months. Together with the Polish prime minister Milinkevich signed an agreement that Polish government will provide scholarships in Poland to Belarusian students who were (or will […]

A Czech reporter from the popular newspaper “Mlada Fronta Dnes” Jan Rybar that was beaten up in Minsk, 200 meters from October square, told his story to RFE/RL Belarus service today. He thinks he “underestimated the dangers” of covering the protests on October square: he was attacked several hundred meters away from the square, in […]