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Violence against peaceful protesters, countless arrests – the situation in Belarus has escalated for weeks. Therefore, Foreign Minister Maas is personally putting the sanctions against President Lukashenko into play.
In view of the situation in Belarus, Federal Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has called for talks on EU sanctions against the head of state, Alexander Lukashenko. “Lukashenko’s violence against peaceful protesters is completely unacceptable,” Maas said at the beginning of a meeting with his EU colleagues in Brussels. Therefore, the EU must ask itself if Lukashenko, who is the main responsible, “should also be sanctioned by the European Union”.
So far, Lukashenko has not been among the people the EU wants to sanction for fraudulent elections or for violently suppressing peaceful protests. The reason given was that sanctions against Lukashenko personally could complicate diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict and deprive the EU of the opportunity to re-adjust its course.
Tichanovskaya: “Legitimacy lost”
The Belarusian opposition party Svetlana Tichanowskaja also called on the EU to impose sanctions on Lukashenko. You think this is necessary, Tichanovskaya said in Brussels. She also called on the EU not to officially recognize Lukashenko as President of Belarus. It had lost “its legitimacy in the eyes of the Belarusian people” in view of the procedure that followed the controversial presidential elections on August 9.
He also called on the EU to stop financially supporting the Belarusian government. They only spend the money on violence. Tichanovskaya ran against Lukashenko in the elections. The state electoral commission declared Lukashenko the winner, and Tichanovskaya left for Lithuania a little later.
Cyprus blocks decision on sanctions
According to the Reuters news agency, another 442 people were arrested on Sunday during protests critical of the government in Belarus, 266 of them in the capital Minsk. Despite the situation, which has been aggravating for weeks, it is still unclear when the EU will even be able to take the punitive measures already envisaged. The reason is a veto from Cyprus, which wants the other EU countries to support new sanctions against Turkey.
Cyprus and Greece have long called on the EU to react more harshly to Turkish gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean that they consider illegal. However, other EU states are of the opinion that this could hamper the ongoing mediation efforts of countries like Germany. Therefore, they want to wait and see before accepting the new sanctions on Turkey proposed by Cyprus.
1000 Russian soldiers during a military exercise with Belarus
The chairman of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, David McAllister, called the combination of the Belarusian and Turkish sanctions “unfortunate”. A decision on Belarus is “overdue, sanctions must finally be decided,” he said in a joint statement. ARD and ZDF Morning Magazine. He expected “the ministers to shake up today.”
Meanwhile, the Belarusian Defense Ministry announced that around 1,000 Russian soldiers will participate in a joint military exercise this week. Russia provides political and financial support to Lukashenko, who has been described as the “last dictator in Europe.” After the 66-year-old was declared the winner of the election with 80.1 percent of the vote in early August, Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin congratulated him on his victory.
