Democracy Digest: Belarus Blame Game and Region with Little Apparent Clout

Sunday's presidential election giving Lukashenko a sixth term in office was, like all but one since 1994, deemed by the EU to have been neither free nor fair. Despite a strong challenge from former teacher Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the autocratic president implausibly won 80% of the vote.

The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), which was not invited by Minsk to act as an election monitor, noted limitations to citizen election observation, including active prevention from observing and several reported cases of detentions on election day.

Like the other previous presidential elections in Belarus, there followed the inevitable protests by citizens angry at the conduct of the election, followed by the equally inevitable violent crackdown by the authorities. Four nights of protests have resulted in at least one death, over 200 injured, some seriously, and more than 6,000 detained.

The BBC reported the interior ministry as saying the police used live ammunition when they came under attack during the protests; Slawomir Sierakowski, founder of the Krytyka Polityczna movement, collected shell casings produced by the Polish company FAM Pionki after a protest in Minsk, in spite of there being an EU arms embargo on Belarus since 2011. The Polish Defence Ministry denied breaking the embargo, but there is still no clear explanation as to how the bullets found their way into the hands of the Belarusian police, though it is possible they were sold to Belarus through a third party.

Lukashenko, of course, sought to blame 'outside forces' for the protests, as opposed to any dissatisfaction by his people with the validity of the election result. He claimed, without providing proof, that the protests were being orchestrated by means...