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MOSCOW. Aleksandr Lukashenko’s regime does not look anyone in the face. Yesterday it was the Women’s March that ended up in the crosshairs of the notorious Belarusian anti-riot forces. Hundreds of protesters demanding the resignation of the “last dictator in Europe” were arrested and dragged away by agents with their faces covered with ski masks. The Belarusian government has so far suppressed the demonstrations with arrests and batons and the closer it gets to the Kremlin, the more determined it is to quell the protest by force.
The EU condemned the violence and It could soon impose sanctions on the regime, which yesterday mobilized against Brussels. According to Minsk, the possible meeting tomorrow between the foreign ministers of the European Union and the opposition and former candidate for the Belarusian presidency Svetlana Tikhanovskaya would be “a bold and shameless interference in the internal affairs” of the country. Harsh words, but immediately adopted by Putin’s Russia, which accused the EU of “flirting” with the Belarusian opposition “violating the fundamental norms of the United Nations Charter”.
It is not yet clear how many protesters were arrested yesterday, but the human rights NGO Viasna has compiled a provisional list of 328 names. The police did not spare anyone, not even the elderly Nina Baginskaya: a 73-year-old woman who has now become an icon of demonstrations for democracy and who once blocked the passage of an armored vehicle by standing in front of him .
The Women’s March is now a fixture in the protests against Lukashenko and his unlikely victory in the August presidential election with 80% of the vote. Every Saturday, between bouquets of flowers and the now inevitable red and white opposition flags, thousands of women take to the streets in Minsk against whom Belarus has ruled with an iron fist for more than a quarter of a century.
Yesterday around 2,000 took part in the march, but soon Omon’s special forces blocked the road and began dragging protesters into their trucks, sometimes brutally. “Only cowards beat women,” protesters chanted in chorus, literally surrounded by agents in front of the “Iceberg” shopping center. Some protesters fell ill during the arrests and required medical attention, including a woman who, according to the Reuters news agency, was apparently unconscious on the ground. There were so many arrests that at one point the police released ten protesters because they ran out of space in the trucks.
MonKashenko he has Russia on his side, which has pledged $ 1.5 billion to the regime and says it is ready to intervene by force if necessary. The protest continues, however, and yesterday some women carried signs with the words “Sos” in their hands: a clear message to the international communityme. –
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