Three Belarusian opposition activists, including 2010 presidential hopeful Vladimir Neklyaev, were preventively arrested in Minsk, on March 21, while walking on the street. At least one of them received a ten-day sentence (Sputnik.by, March 22). All three—Neklayev, Vyacheslav Siuchyk and Maxim Vinyarsky, were members of... MORE

A memorial to the Lutskevich brothers was installed, on March 13, in downtown Minsk. It consists of a large engraved stone commemorating two houses where, in 1896–1906, Anton and Ivan Lutskevich lived with their families (Tut.by, March 13). Both led the Belarusian national movement and... MORE

In late February, Tom Post, editorial advisor at the Finnish and Baltic edition of Forbes, and Arkady Shteimans, referred to as the publisher of Forbes in Latvia, Estonia and Finland, paid a visit to Minsk. In this regard, Dev.by, an online publication about the Belarusian... MORE

The Minsk city administration allowed the opposition-based Organizing Committee (OC) of the centennial celebration of the Belarusian People’s Republic (BPR) (see EDM, January 25) to organize a meeting and a concert downtown, at a square park adjacent to the capital city’s massive opera house. Both... MORE

If there is a common refrain to be found in the continual stream of ostensibly disparate but newsworthy developments related to Belarus, it is the country’s lingering quest for national unity. Lately, this overarching narrative has been entangled in Belarus’s Olympic triumphs in PyeongChang. First,... MORE

“The world is one step from a global confrontation with unpredictable consequences,” declared President Alyaksandr Lukashenka at the meeting of Belarus’s Security Council. “Whereas Russia will bear the brunt of defending our common space, there is no understanding on the part of Russia’s leadership that... MORE

Many still view Belarus’s foreign and security policies through the prism of several popular but simplistic narratives. One of them classifies Belarus as Russia’s geopolitical backyard and, thus, tends to interpret every international move by Minsk as dictated by the Kremlin. Within another narrative, the... MORE

Belarus’s Ministry of Culture has allowed the airing of Armando Iannucci’s comedic movie The Death of Stalin (Tut.by, February 5), earlier banned in Russia. Predictably, Russian ultra-patriots called this decision “ideological sabotage” (Russkaya Narodnaya Liniya, February 6). According to some Belarusian interpretations, the discrepancy between... MORE

The passing of Gene Sharp, the author of the influential 1973 book The Politics of Nonviolent Action, did not go unnoticed across the post-Soviet space. A sampling of headlines in the Russian media say much about the late political scientists’ perception in that realm: “The... MORE

During Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s meeting in Washington with his US counterpart, Donald Trump, on January 16, a suggestion reportedly came up to transfer the venue of talks and negotiations about the war in eastern Ukraine from Minsk to Astana. An avalanche of opinions followed.... MORE