Alexander Lukashenko
Alexander Lukashenko has been president of Belarus since July 1994, the collective-farm director who was the only deputy to vote against the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, ran for the new presidency in 1994 as the anti-corruption candidate and won the run-off with eighty per cent. He has held the office since through a referendum of 1996 that gave him the parliament and the courts, another of 2004 that removed the term limit, and elections in 2001, 2006, 2010, 2015, 2020 and 2025 that no Western observer has called free, the last of which gave him eighty-seven per cent. The country he has kept is the Soviet Union with better roads. There are the state farms and factories, the KGB still called that, the death penalty still used, the Russian gas at a discount that has been the economy's margin, and the union state with Russia signed in 1999 and never quite made. There are the Russian bases and the Russian nuclear weapons, stationed from 2023, that the war in Ukraine brought. The election of August 2020, which he declared won with eighty per cent against Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, standing in for her jailed husband, brought the largest protests in the country's history, hundreds of thousands in Minsk for months. They were answered with thirty-five thousand arrests, and the beatings in the Okrestina prison that the country heard through the walls. There was the exile of the opposition to Vilnius and Warsaw, the forcing down of a Ryanair flight over Minsk in May 2021 to arrest a journalist aboard, and the migrants pushed at the Polish border that winter. There were the fifteen hundred political prisoners the count reached. Putin's backing and the Russian riot police on standby were the reason he survived and Ukraine's invasion from Belarusian soil in February 2022 was the price. He was born in Kopys in 1954 to an unmarried mother, studied history and agriculture, served in the border guards, and ran a state farm at Shklov. He entered the supreme soviet in 1990, where the anti-corruption committee he chaired made him. His moustache, his ice hockey, his son Kolya carried to summits from the age of three, and his remark that the pandemic could be cured with vodka and the sauna are the folklore. He has released prisoners in batches since 2024 in exchange for American sanctions relief, including Tikhanovskaya's husband in June 2025. He has said he will not hand power to his sons, and that Belarus will be the last to recognise anything. At seventy-two and unwell, he is the longest-serving leader in Europe.
- Lived: 1954 CE – ?
- Nationality: Belarusian
- Roles: president, dictator
