On 9 August, presidential election day, clashes broke out throughout Belarus as riot law enforcement applied rubber bullets, flash grenades, teargas and h2o cannon to quash protests. Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled for 26 yrs, claimed he had gained a landslide victory in an election marred by accusations of vote-rigging. The election commission introduced the upcoming day that he experienced taken 80.23% of the votes when his key opposition challenger, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who has held some of the country’s biggest political rallies since the times of the Soviet Union, experienced only 9.9%.

Hanna Liubakova, a Belarusian journalist, tells Rachel Humphreys what it has been like masking the protests in excess of the past several days, even though the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Andrew Roth, discusses how Lukashenko has remained in electricity for so extensive. Meanwhile, Tikhanovskaya has remaining for Lithuania. Vocal critics of the govt say she was blackmailed, pointing to a development, stretching again a lot more than a 10 years, of placing force on opposition politicians and their people.

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