MINSK, Belarus — Safety forces in Belarus on Monday arrested two of the final high-profile opposition figures not already in jail for protesting in opposition to the nation’s authoritarian president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko. The arrests got here as a senior United States diplomat met with the embattled president’s most outstanding opponent, who fled the nation beneath duress earlier this month.
Within the first publicly acknowledged high-level contact between the U.S. authorities and the Belarusian opposition, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen E. Biegun met in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, with Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Mr. Lukashenko’s principal rival within the disputed presidential election on Aug. 9 that triggered mass protests.
Ms. Tikhanovskaya claimed victory within the election. Mr. Lukashenko, pointing to official outcomes that his opponents and European leaders referred to as fraudulent, insists he received by a landslide. She fled to Lithuania every week in the past after safety brokers in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, detained her and compelled her to make a video urging folks to not protest the election outcome.
The hazards that awaited her had she stayed in Belarus had been evident on Monday, when riot law enforcement officials seized Olga Kovalkova, an ally of Ms. Tikhanovskaya, and Sergei Dylevsky, a strike chief at a tractor manufacturing unit in Minsk.
Each had been seized in entrance of the Minsk Tractor Works, an unlimited, Soviet-era plant whose employees, lengthy seen as loyal supporters of the federal government, final week threatened to go on strike except Mr. Lukashenko stepped down.
Two different activists had been informed to report for questioning by the nation’s investigative committee in a felony case in opposition to the opposition’s coordinating council. Considered one of them was the Nobel Prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich, a member of the council.
Defying expectations that the protest motion is perhaps dropping steam within the face of a violent crackdown by Mr. Lukashenko, greater than 100,000 folks flooded into Minsk on Sunday, calling for the president to step down after 26 years in energy. Mr. Lukashenko, well-known for his shows of macho bravado, responded by showing exterior his presidential palace waving an automated rifle.
The disaster in Belarus, a nation of 9.5 million people who has lengthy served as an authoritarian buffer between Russia and the NATO-member democracies Lithuania and Poland, has escalated in latest days past simply an inside political battle to grow to be a spotlight of geopolitical tensions between Russia and the West.
Moscow and Washington every insist they haven’t any canine within the combat and simply need the Belarusian folks to settle their very own affairs peacefully, whereas additionally accusing one another of meddling.
Simply minutes earlier than the assembly in Lithuania between the American official and Ms. Tikhanovskaya, the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, informed journalists in Moscow that President Vladimir V. Putin thought-about all international interference in Belarus “inadmissible” and wished it to cease.
“These are the forces at present attempting to place direct and oblique stress on the occasions in Belarus. Such factor exists, and regretfully, this can’t be ignored,” Mr. Peskov stated.
In an indication of eager Russian curiosity within the occasions in Belarus, Mr. Putin and Mr. Lukashenko once more mentioned the disaster by phone on Monday, their third such dialog in simply over every week. Mr. Lukashenko has sought to rally Russia to his aspect by portray his opponents as Western stooges and his personal political survival as important for Russia’s safety.
However not like Ukrainian protesters who toppled their very own president in 2014, lots of whom regarded Russia as an enemy, opponents of Mr. Lukashenko have labored to reassure Moscow that their motion is just not anti-Russian and {that a} change of management in Minsk wouldn’t imply Belarus aligning with NATO and the European Union.
Talking on Monday at a information convention in Minsk, members of the coordinating council, a unfastened physique created by opposition members to streamline their actions, vowed that they might by no means do something to break long-close relations between Belarus and Russia.
“Whoever gives to construct a wall between Belarus and Russia would be the final politician in Belarus,” stated Pavel P. Latushko, a former member of Mr. Lukashenko’s authorities, now a member of the council’s presidium.
Talking in Lithuania after his assembly with Ms. Tikhanovskaya, Mr. Biegun, the deputy secretary of state, prevented endorsing the opposition’s declare that Mr. Lukashenko misplaced the election, however described Ms. Tikhanovskaya as “very spectacular,” saying, “I can see why she is so fashionable in her nation.”
Mr. Biegun, who’s scheduled to journey to Moscow on Tuesday to debate Belarus with Russian officers, stated the US, “can’t and won’t determine the course of occasions in Belarus,” including that, “there’s an end result right here that may be acceptable to everybody.”
He has repeatedly depicted his opponents as American puppets, declaring on Friday that “the usA. is planning and working all this, whereas Europeans are enjoying alongside.” He belittled Ms. Tikhanovskaya as a housewife in over her head, a “regular girl who loves her kids however who has been thrown into this futile combat and is now treading water.” He claimed that he had helped her journey to Lithuania “at her request,” and mocked her for not staying in Belarus.
After beating protesters savagely and arresting greater than 6,000 folks throughout an preliminary spherical of protests after the election outcomes had been introduced two weeks in the past, Mr. Lukashenko’s safety forces toned down the usage of drive, permitting protesters to assemble freely in giant numbers for 2 weekends in a row.
This new method seems to have help from Russia, the place state-controlled tv has featured a collection of Belarus specialists who’ve blamed Mr. Lukashenko’s heavy-handed repression for a surge within the variety of protesters and voiced hope that he would proceed what one referred to as “his extra rational” coverage of arresting protest leaders however not lashing out wildly.
However concern that mass arrests and brutal beatings may shortly return hangs over the loosely-organized protest motion, amplified by Mr. Lukashenko’s usually hysterical statements and insults. He final week denounced protesters as “wild Nazis” and “tricksters,” and on Saturday he referred to as them “rats.”
Ivan Nechepurenko reported from Minsk and Andrew Higgins from Moscow.
