The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Belarus has summoned the Polish charge d’affaires and handed him a note of protest in response to the Freedom March and the Belarusian opposition conference planned for this weekend in Warsaw.
The events will commemorate the fifth anniversary of the 2020 presidential elections in Belarus, which the opposition considers undemocratic and fraudulent, writes wPolityce. For their part, Belarusian authorities claim that Alexander Lukashenko won the 2020 election fair and square.
According to the Belarusian authorities, the organizers and participants of both events are representatives of the Belarusian diaspora “known for their destructive and provocative actions,” and the march and conference themselves “aim to harm the Republic of Belarus.”
The Belarusian foreign ministry also stated that both events are intended to “justify illegal sanctions and aggressive actions against our country.”
“Such hostile actions do not contribute to the restoration of normal dialogue and directly harm Belarusian-Polish relations,” Ruslan Varankov, press spokesman for the ministry, wrote in a statement. He added that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Minsk “will continue to closely monitor the development of the situation, reserving the right to take necessary countermeasures in the event of provocative actions.”
He did not specify which measures may possibly be taken.
This Saturday at 3 p.m., the Freedom March organized by the Belarusian opposition will begin in Józef Piłsudski Square in Warsaw, and the “New Belarus” conference is scheduled for Saturday and Sunday at the University of Warsaw.
Both events are related to the presidential elections of Aug. 9, 2020, which Lukashenko officially won. The 70-year-old politician has held this office continuously since 1994, when presidential elections were first held in Belarus.
The Freedom March and the “New Belarus” conference are an opportunity “to remind ourselves and the world once again that we fight for a free and democratic country every day,” the office of the opposition candidate in the 2020 elections, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, told press.
