Belarus was rocked by months of protests after election officials gave Lukashenko a sixth term in the 2020 balloting that the opposition and the West have denounced as a sham. The government unleashed a violent crackdown on the protesters, arresting more than 35,000 people and badly beating thousands of them. The crackdown elicited widespread international outrage.
It’s the closest he could find to a Trumpland in reality instead of his head.
From the Guardian:
Brussels said it was in talks with 13 countries that could be sources of people for Belarus to send to the EU’s external border. They are Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Georgia, Guinea, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Turkey.
Minsk has reportedly issued special visas allowing people to fly into Belarus from Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries.
Fuckers. They are actively bringing people in from other continents with the false promise of easy entry into the EU.
One interview I saw (IIRC on the BBC) featured 3 black men who looked and sounded like they were probably of Congolese descent. (We have a sizable community in my town; these men were speaking English.) I wondered if they were foreign workers, but now I wonder if this was how they got there.