Lukashenko seeks easing of Belarus isolation as he extends his long rule

By Mark Trevelyan

(Reuters) - Five candidates' names will appear on the ballot for a presidential election in Belarus on Sunday, but for the past 31 years there has only been one winner.

In power since 1994, Alexander Lukashenko is assured of a new five-year term in a vote that the exiled opposition describes as a sham. It has called on Belarusians to tick a box that allows them to reject all the candidates on offer.

Lukashenko, 70, has cast himself as a leader too busy working for the nation to be able to engage in an election campaign. "To be honest I don't follow it. I simply don't have time for it," he told factory workers last week.

There is no obvious successor in sight to the burly, moustachioed leader who at various times has both embraced and rejected the label of Europe's last dictator - and who in recent months has started freeing some opposition figures from jail in an apparent bid to start repairing relations with the West.

Mass protests nearly swept him from power after the last election in 2020, when Western governments backed the opposition's claim that he falsified the results and stole victory from its candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

Lukashenko's security forces detained tens of thousands of protesters, according to human rights groups, and all leading opposition figures were jailed or forced into exile.

Sunday's vote is taking place in a country where independent media are banned and blocked. Human rights group Viasna, which is labelled as an extremist organisation, says there are around 1,250 political prisoners; Lukashenko denies there are any.

Ivan Kravtsov, secretary of the opposition's coordination council in exile, conceded that it was fighting an uphill struggle to connect with Belarusians.

"For most of the people, politics is not top of the agenda. Survival is top of the agenda," he said in a telephone interview.

"The priorities have shifted. In 2020 people perceived the campaign as a real opportunity to change power. Now, you know, sometimes the opposition leaders in exile are struggling to be relevant inside the country."

Tatsiana Chulitskaya, a Belarusian academic at Vilnius University in Lithuania, said the four alternative election candidates had not dared criticise the president.

"These are not candidates in the normal meaning of this word. They are just playing in this campaign. They are not competing with Lukashenko," she said in a phone interview.

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But while the outcome is not in doubt, Lukashenko faces major challenges in navigating relations with both Moscow and the West as he heads into his seventh term against the backdrop of likely peace talks to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

A close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, he allowed Moscow to use Belarus as a launchpad for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 - and paid the price in the form of Western sanctions. The following year, Putin announced the deployment of Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.

If the war were to end - something incoming U.S. President Donald Trump has promised to bring about quickly - then political analysts expect Lukashenko to seek a thaw in ties with Europe and the U.S. and try to get the sanctions lifted.

That would be in keeping with his decades-long record of flirting periodically with the West in order to prevent Belarus from becoming totally dependent on Russia and risking being swallowed up entirely by its much larger neighbour.

"If the war ends, there will be certain windows of opportunity for Lukashenko if he wants to continue these tactics of balancing between Russia and the West," Chulitskaya said.

In the first tentative signs of an easing of repression, Lukashenko has, since last July, issued what he called humanitarian pardons to 250 people serving prison terms for alleged extremist activity.

He has also allowed limited access in prison to two of the best known opposition figures, Maria Kalesnikava and Viktor Babariko, who had been isolated for nearly two years without any contact with the outside world.

The opposition says it welcomes those developments but many more people remain in jail, and arrests continue.

Its exiled leader Tsikhanouskaya told Reuters in an interview this week that the release of political prisoners in batches was part of a game Lukashenko was playing with the West.

"We need to stop repressions, we need to release all prisoners and maybe then we will talk to you," she said.

(Reporting by Mark Trevelyan in London; Editing by Gareth Jones)