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LONDON – For the man known as Europe’s last dictator, it’s personal.
When Belarusian Olympic sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, 24, criticized her country’s sports officials this week for putting her in an unknown race, she said she was told to go home immediately and face the challenges. consequences of calling into question the wishes of the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko.
She left Tokyo on a flight to Austria early Wednesday after spending two nights at the Polish Embassy in Tokyo. She is expected to travel to Poland, which offered her a humanitarian visa on Monday.
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Experts say sportsman Lukashenko, whose son heads the National Olympic Committee and inherited the role from his father, could not leave criticism of the sprinter unpunished.
Lukashenko “is really very sensitive in terms of sports and even more so when there are criticisms – he likes to pretend he is a sportsman, in such good physical shape, who takes care of sportsmen”, said Veronica Laputska, co – founder of the Eurasian States in Transition Research Center, a Warsaw-based think tank. “There is a personal element here. It will have irritated him.
It’s the latest sign of what Belarusian observers say is the nervous insecurity of a ruler who has ruled with authoritarian zeal for 27 years but fears time is running out.
The episode began when Tsimanouskaya said on Instagram over the weekend that he was told to run in the 4x400m relay because other Belarusian athletes failed to pass the required number of doping tests.
For that, she and her husband, Arseni Zdanevich, who fled Belarus to Ukraine, the Associated Press reported, must now start a new life in a new country.
When boarding her flight, she wore sunglasses bearing the message “I RUN CLEAN,” Reuters reported.
In an interview with the AP on Tuesday evening, Tsimanouskaya said officials “made it clear that upon my return home, I would certainly face some form of punishment. There were also barely disguised clues that ‘others would be waiting for me.
Tsimanouskaya fled Tokyo nearly a year after Lukashenko claimed victory in a contested election, sparking a protest movement against his regime.
Tens of thousands joined the marches calling for his resignation and handover of power to opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who fled to neighboring Lithuania and last week met both President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Lukashenko is out of the protest movement – thousands of people have been arrested and many remain in prison – but observers say it has made him more belligerent and sensitive to criticism.
According to Elena Korosteleva, professor of international politics at the University of Kent in England, the target audience for the action against Tsimanouskaya was very much ordinary Belarusians.
“You can see how they exaggerated it all – just a brief criticism by a sprinter of the Belarusian bureaucracy suddenly turned into an international scandal. It’s another show of power, ”she said.
“What Lukashenko is aiming for is ‘fear of the project’, to show that even at these Games in Japan, he can still reach out and punish anyone who disagrees or dares to criticize.”
A murder investigation is underway in Kiev, Ukraine, after a prominent Belarusian who helped compatriots escape persecution was found hanged in a park.
Belarus made headlines in May when a flight taking 26-year-old Belarusian journalist and activist Roman Protasevich from Greece to Lithuania was intercepted by fighter jets and rerouted to Minsk, the Belarusian capital, under the pretext of ‘a false bomb threat.
Protasevich was arrested and later confessed to plotting to bring down the president in a TV interview. Opposition figures said he was forced to participate in a propaganda exercise.
And on Friday, Lukashenko told Belta state television that he was ready to mobilize 500,000 troops to defend its borders against an unspecified enemy, with the support of Russian forces if necessary.
The events of the past week show how the Lukashenko regime, short of international friends and with latent resentment at home, is doing everything it can to secure power, experts say.
Lukashenko “feels very vulnerable at the moment because he knows he is very dependent on Russia, which seems to be the sole protector of Belarus at the moment,” Korosteleva said. “He knows he remains very vulnerable against his own people, and of course against the international community.
Although Lukashenko has said he will step down once the country adopts a new constitution, experts say this is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Meanwhile, the lingering resentment of Belarusians who think he stole the 2020 election seems to be slowly building up.
“Lukashenko has succeeded in directly thwarting all street protests, but indirect resistance continues and it survives through all kinds of digital means, through social media,” Korosteleva said. “This means that one way or another, if not today, the Lukashenko regime is definitely coming to an end.”
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