Putin ally Lukashenko declared winner in Belarus election scorned by the West as a sham

Belarusian leader and Russian ally Alexander Lukashenko extended his 31-year rule on Monday after electoral officials declared him the winner of a presidential election that Western governments rejected as a sham.“You can congratulate the Republic of Belarus, we have elected a president,” Igor Karpenko, the head of the country’s Central Election Commission, told a news conference in the early hours of Monday.Lukashenko, who faced no serious challenge from the four other candidates on the ballot, took 86.8% of the vote, according to initial results published on the Central Election Commission’s official Telegram account.European politicians said the vote was neither free nor fair because independent media are banned in the former Soviet republic and all leading opposition figures have either been jailed or forced to flee abroad.“The people of Belarus had no choice.It is a bitter day for all those who long for freedom & democracy,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock posted on X.Election officials said turnout was 85.7% in the election, in which 6.9 million people were eligible to vote.Asked about the jailing of his opponents, Lukashenko had told a news conference on Sunday that they had chosen their own fate.“Some chose prison, some chose ‘exile’, as you say.

We didn’t kick anyone out of the country,” he told a rambling news conference that lasted more than four hours.A close ally of President Vladimir Putin who allowed the Russian leader to use his country as a staging area for sending troops into Ukraine in 2022, Lukashenko had earlier defended his jailing of dissidents and declared: “I don’t give a damn about the West.”Exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya told Reuters this week that Lukashenko had engineered his re-election as part of a “ritual for dictators”.Demonstrations against him took place on Sunday in Warsaw and other East European cities.Lukashenko shrugged off the criticism as meaningless and said ...