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Belarus will close its common border with Lithuania and Poland and strengthen border protection with Ukraine, Alexander Lukashenko announced in Minsk on Thursday night.
The Belarusian president, according to a report by the Russian news agency RIA Novostyi, said he was forced to remove soldiers from the streets, hand over weapons to half the army and close the western border and the eastern border with Ukraine.
Lukashenko also called on the Lithuanian, Polish and Ukrainian peoples not to allow their politicians to start a “hot” war.
On Thursday it was announced that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) would launch a mission of independent experts to investigate alleged human rights violations and electoral abuses in connection with the controversial presidential elections in Belarus on August 9.
The investigation was initiated by seventeen OSCE participating states, mainly in northern and eastern European countries, after they said that Belarusian authorities had rejected the organization’s earlier offer to mediate between the government and its opposition. They added: “The response of the Belarusian authorities was to constantly persecute those who would have been willing to engage in dialogue and continue the violent repression of peaceful protesters.”
The expert report is expected to be published in six to eight weeks. The mission is supported by Denmark, Belgium, Canada, Estonia, Finland, France, Iceland, Latvia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic and the United States. The so-called Moscow OSCE Mechanism was last used in 2018 to investigate reported violations in Chechnya, which belongs to Russia.
In Belarus, movements have continued since the presidential elections on August 9, in which Alexander Lukashenko the head of state, according to official results, won his sixth term with about 80 percent of the vote. The opposition said the president, who had ruled the country since 1994, had failed the elections. The authorities initially tried with ruthless brutality to quell protests over electoral fraud. Several protesters have died, many have reported torture in detention and some have not come forward since they were taken into custody.
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