Add thelocalreport.in As A Trusted Source
As Russiamilitary invasion of ukraine thunder later More than three years of bloody conflictA man has stood up for the Russian President Vladimir Putin At every step: Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko,
The 71-year-old strongman, who has been in power since July 1994, was quick to support Putin by hosting and offering to send 30,000 troops to his soil ahead of an invasion scheduled to begin in February 2022. send your troops to ukraine to support Russia “if needed.”
Lukashenko later helped Putin by hosting Russian tactical nuclear weapons in his country, playing a key role in negotiations to end the short-lived insurgency. Yevgeny Prigozhin‘S Wagner Group mercenaries and by threatening the West with nuclear war if it backed down. ukraine With heavy weapons.
Lukashenko considers himself both his country’s “batka” (father) and Europe’s “last dictator”. However, his authority is not recognized by most Western governments, as he has been repeatedly accused of rigging several presidential elections. In the last of these, in January this year, he was returned to power with 88 percent of the vote.
Born under Soviet rule on 31 August 1954 in Kopis, Vitebsk Oblast, Lukashenko was reportedly bullied in school because of his unmarried mother, Ekaterina Trofimovna Lukashenko, who was forced to do various odd jobs to support herself and her son. Coincidentally, his own mother came from the Sumy Oblast in northern Ukraine.
The identity and whereabouts of the future president’s father are unknown. However, he is rumored in some circles to have been an itinerant member of the Roma community passing through the area.
Lukashenko graduated from the Mogilev Pedagogical Institute in 1975 and served in the Belarusian Border Guard from 1975 to 1977, where he was an instructor in political affairs stationed in Brest near the Polish border, and then in the Soviet Army from 1980 to 1982, where he was a deputy political officer with the 120th Guards Motor Rifle Division, based in Minsk.
In the intervening years, he led a chapter of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (Komsomol) in Mogilev.
Between 1982 and his election to parliament in 1990, Lukashenko first became deputy chairman of a collective farm and then director of the Gorodets state farm in the Shkello district, also managing a building materials plant.
with the fall of soviet unionHe was elected as a deputy of the Supreme Council of the Republic belarus and soon established a reputation as an opponent of corruption, which would form the basis of his political appeal – somewhat ironically, as it turned out.
In late 1993, he accused 70 senior officials of embezzlement of state funds, enough to secure the resignation of Council Chairman Stanislav Shushkevich after losing a vote of confidence. The scandal ultimately proved baseless but provided Lukashenko with the necessary platform to ascend to the presidency the following summer.
In office, he remained passionately pro-Russian and sought closer ties with Moscow, being the only deputy to oppose the agreement that led to formal dissolution. soviet union In December 1991.
He later appealed boris yeltsin and the Russian Duma for a new federation of Slavic states. It was a time when the map of Europe was being largely redrawn, and other former satellite states behind the Iron Curtain were celebrating their new independence and daring to imagine a brighter tomorrow.
With no such coalition emerging, he planned to sideline his own affairs and install a new constitution, approved in 1996, that offered him a suite of authoritarian powers, enabling him to rule by decree, extend his term in office, and personally appoint one-third of parliament.
They began to suppress political dissent and silence the media as Belarus once again isolated itself from the international community, no longer a part of it. soviet union But now it is an independent untouchable state in its own right.
In 1999, he extended his first term by two years to complete negotiations on a treaty with Russia, promising broader political cooperation between the two states.
He was duly re-elected in 2001, 2006 and again in 2010, with widespread claims of voting irregularities tarnishing both latter “victories” and ensuring fresh condemnation from the EU.
Lukashenko told local protesters that he would “wring their necks like ducks” if they objected.
When Putin annexed the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 as punishment for popularly overthrowing his ally viktor yanukovych As president, Lukashenko has attempted to play the role of peacemaker since provoking the separatist war in Donbass.
Putin and Yanukovych’s successors, Petro PoroshenkoMet in the capital of Belarus with the encouragement of France and Germany. they finally Signed two Minsk agreements to bring peace to the region, which were never implemented due to different interpretations of their meaning by Kiev and Moscow.
Lukashenko has since won three more elections in 2015, 2020 and 2025, all of which were again claimed amid widespread suspicion that the one-time anti-corruption tsar was again the beneficiary of crooked calculations.
His August 2020 victory led to mass protests by voters over his governance and poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic (he told his people to “kill the virus with vodka,” go to saunas and work in the fields to avoid infection, and declared: “Tractors will fix everyone!”).
The largest of these demonstrations brought 200,000 people to the streets and a violent police crackdown that left thousands beaten, 35,000 activists and opposition leaders arrested Svetlana Tikhanovskaya And Veronika Tsepkalo was forced into exile.
as part of A spirit of vengeance followed his return to the Independence Palace in Minsk, Maria Kolesnikova – a leading member of the opposition Coordination Council – was sentenced to 11 years in prison and his lawyer Maxim Znak was jailed for 10 years, after the pair were charged with trumped-up charges of plotting to seize power, creating an extremist organization and calling for actions that harm state security.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of Minsk ordered the closure of the Belarusian Association of Journalists. The liquidation followed the jailing of approximately 30 journalists, raids on newspaper offices, blocking of websites belonging to major independent media organizations, and closure of the PEN Center writers’ organization led by Nobel Literature Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich.
Lukashenko’s administration also revoked the accreditation of foreign news organizations when the initial protests began, silencing the media, which remains a key tactic in ensuring both his own regressive rule and Putin’s rule in the Kremlin.
After international notoriety, the Belarusian leader last May ordered a Ryanair jetliner bound from Greece to Lithuania to be diverted to Minsk so that one of its passengers, self-exiled opposition journalist Raman Pratasevich, could be arrested.
Belarusian officials said the action was taken after receiving a bomb threat to the plane. Nevertheless, Western officials described it as a blatant attempt to disguise it as an act of piracy.
Despite much fanfare at the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Lukashenko’s most significant contribution so far has been to negotiate an end to the insurgency by Prigozhin’s Wagner forces in June 2023. That rebellion briefly threatened to overthrow Putin, but his men were ultimately defeated and Prigozhin died untimely in a suspicious plane crash just two months later.
Lukashenko later continued to remind the West of Russian nuclear weapons in its backyard and signaled he was prepared to use them, in an effort to dissuade the president from recently threatening him. donald trump From providing Tomahawk long-range missiles to Ukraine.
As for the future, the Belarusian said in August 2025 that he was “not planning” to seek another term, while also dismissing speculation that his son Nikolai was being groomed to succeed him.