Belarusian leader and Russian ally Alexander Lukashenko extended his 31-year rule on Monday after electoral officials declared him the winner of a presidential election that Western governments rejected as a sham.
"You can congratulate the Republic of Belarus, we have elected a president," Igor Karpenko, the head of the country's Central Election Commission, told a news conference in the early hours of Monday.
Lukashenko, who faced no serious challenge from the four other candidates on the ballot, took 86.8% of the vote, according to initial results published on the Central Election Commission's official Telegram account.
European politicians said the vote was neither free nor fair because independent media are banned in the former Soviet republic and all leading opposition figures have either been jailed or forced to flee abroad.
"The people of Belarus had no choice. It is a bitter day for all those who long for freedom & democracy," German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock posted on X.
Election officials said turnout was 85.7% in the election, in which 6.9 million people were eligible to vote.
Asked about the jailing of his opponents, Lukashenko had told a news conference on Sunday that they had chosen their own fate.
"Some chose prison, some chose 'exile', as you say. We didn't kick anyone out of the country," he told a rambling news conference that lasted more than four hours.
A close ally of President Vladimir Putin who allowed the Russian leader to use his country as a staging area for sending troops into Ukraine in 2022, Lukashenko had earlier defended his jailing of dissidents and declared: "I don't give a damn about the West."
Exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya told Reuters this week that Lukashenko had engineered his re-election as part of a "ritual for dictators". Demonstrations against him took place on Sunday in Warsaw and other East European cities.
Lukashenko shrugged off the criticism as meaningless and said he did not care whether the West recognized the election.
PUTIN ALLY
The European Union and the United States both said they did not acknowledge him as the legitimate leader of Belarus after he used his security forces to crush mass protests following the last election in 2020, when Western governments backed Tsikhanouskaya's claim that Lukashenko had rigged the count and cheated her of victory.
Human rights group Viasna, which is banned as an "extremist" organization in Belarus, says there are still about 1,250 political prisoners in his jails though Lukashenko has freed more than 250 in the past year on what he called humanitarian grounds.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Sunday that Belarus had "just unilaterally released an innocent American", whom he named as Anastassia Nuhfer.
He gave no further details about the case, which had not been made public.
The war in Ukraine has bound Lukashenko more tightly than ever to Putin, and Russian tactical nuclear weapons are now deployed in Belarus.
If the conflict ends, political analysts say he is most likely to seek to restore his ties with the West in an attempt to get sanctions lifted.
