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Half-a-year ago Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus with an iron Soviet-style fist for a quarter of century, looked to be unassailable. But the former collective farm manager, whose aides and supporters like to dub him “father,” is now being widely labeled a “cockroach” — and his opponents are vowing to “squash the pest” come August when he faces a presidential election.
 
In the past, Lukashenko has managed elections in much the same way as Russian leader Vladimir Putin – disqualify serious opponents from running, fiddle the tallies and silence independent media, according to international election monitors. During the last poll in 2015, many Belarusians observed the upheaval in neighboring Ukraine and took fright, deciding they preferred the leaden, if impoverishing, stability of Lukashenko over unpredictable and possibly ruinous change, say analysts.
 
But this time, Lukashenko is threatened not by a so-called “color revolution” but with a “slipper uprising,” thanks to popular blogger Sergei Tikhanovsky, who was arrested at a rally last month after an alleged assault on a police officer.  
 
Tikhanovsky was behind the labeling of Lukashenko as a “cockroach,” saying he resembled the insect in a popular children’s poem called “The Mighty Cockroach.” He had taken to driving around Belarus campaigning with a giant slipper tied to the roof of his car — a signal of his intention to flatten Lukashenko.FILE – Blogger Sergei Tikhanovsky speaks during a rally of supporters of opposition politicians amid the coronavirus pandemic, in Minsk, Belarus May 24, 2020. Charged with public disorder and accused of being a foreign agent after the security services claimed to have unearthed $900,000 in cash during a subsequent search of his home, Tikhanovsky is blocked from running. His 38-year-old wife, Svetlana, has stepped up as a substitute to challenge Lukashenko.  
 
And she has become, on paper, the incumbent Lukashenko’s biggest threat, following the detention on Friday of another challenger, Viktor Babaryko, a 56-year-old former banker, who was arrested for alleged financial crimes, along with his campaign manager, his son. “Babaryko is detained because he was the organizer and leader of illegal activities,” Ivan Tertel, head of the state control committee, told AFP news agency.  
 
Tertel also accused Babaryko of conspiring with Russian “puppeteers.”
 
The arrests of Tikhanovsky, Babaryko and other Lukashenko critics— which have triggered street protests in the streets of Minsk, the Belarus capital, and earned a rebuke from the European Union  — puts Svetlana Tikhanovskaya even more in the spotlight.  
 
Even before Babaryko’s detention, 16% of Belarusians backed her candidacy, according to an unofficial poll run by the news site Tut.by. Police have told the website not to publish any more polls. And the signs are that she is unnerving the idiosyncratic authoritarian leader unaccustomed to challenge. Midweek she told reporters an anonymous caller told her to pull out of the election, warning the Tikhanovskys’ ten-year-old son and four-year-old daughter could be taken away from them if she refused.FILE – Supporters of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya collect signatures in support of her nomination as a candidate in the upcoming presidential election, in Minsk, Belarus, May 24, 2020.She says she had considered backing down, but has decided to continue, determined to be a champion for Belarusians, many of whom “don’t know that in Europe you can say what you think without fear.” She added, “I’ve never wanted to be a politician, let alone the president. This is just how things have turned out.”
 
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya has become an unlikely revolutionary figurehead. She describes herself as just a stay-at-home mother and wife. One of the couple’s children has special needs. But the enthusiasm for change is clear. Towns across the landlocked country of nine million have seen protests and crowds appear to support her candidacy and the campaigns of other opposition candidates. She acknowledges “people at these rallies are supporting Sergei, not me.”
 
Her husband, who has been compared to Alexei Navalny, the blogger turned opposition leader in neighboring Russia, says he is playing “the main role in my wife Svetlana Tikhanovskaya’s election campaign; her role will be only a nominal one.” He has in the campaign team other popular bloggers.
 
Despite last week’s arrests people in Minsk are lining up again to sign the nomination papers of candidates opposing Lukashenko, according to Belarusian journalist Hanna Liubakova. She tweeted Sunday: “3 leading #Lukashenko’s rivals collected more than 730,000 signatures in less than a month. If you count 3 other alternative candidates, it is more than a million. This campaign has already shown that the level of activism and political engagement is incredibly high.”  
 
Candidates have to gather at least 100,000 signatures to be qualified to stand. FILE – Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko chairs a meeting with officials in Minsk, Belarus, June 19, 2020.The opposition to Lukashenko is being fueled by an increasingly parlous economic situation, a coronavirus crisis, which the president downplayed from the start and cheerily told Belarusians to take saunas and drink vodka to avoid falling ill, and just a weariness with his rule and stagnation, analysts say. Younger Belarusians seem impervious to Lukashenko’s warnings of chaos, if he’s not reelected to his sixth term. And they are immune seemingly to the Soviet-like stability their elders favor.  
 
Lukashenko is not being helped in his political struggle by neighboring Russia. His relationship with Vladimir Putin has long been a fitful one with the two falling out frequently and then circling back for convenience sake. A senior Russian diplomat based in Minsk described to VOA once the “shouting match” he overheard during a phone conversation between the pair.  
 
Analysts say Putin’s major objective towards Belarus is to ensure — much as his goal is with Ukraine — that it doesn’t end up as a pro-Western enclave on Russia’s borders, say analysts. The Belarusian leader has long played the West against Russia and vice versa. He observed a neutral stance over Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and hosted peace talks in Minsk to try to find a solution to the war in eastern Ukraine.
 
But he has relied on Russia financially for help — and that has been less forthcoming with subsidies and oil supplies in recent months, punishment, analysts and diplomats say, for Lukashenko’s resistance to Putin’s efforts to draw Minsk deeper into the Russian orbit.
 
Few analysts predict that anyone other than Lukashenko will be allowed to win the Aug. 9 poll — and they warn that Belarus could quickly be plunged into a Maidan-like uprising that saw the 2014 ouster of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine.  
 
Protests are spreading across Belarus as opposition to Lukashenko grows, local media and human rights organizations report. On Friday, more than 10 cities across the former Soviet republic saw protests with dozens of activists arrested by the security forces. The independent human rights group Viasna says least 120 people were detained.
 
Lukashenko appears to be preparing for the likelihood of a violent reaction to his seemingly inevitable electoral win, claiming on Friday that by arresting Babaryko and dozens of political activists he had foiled a Ukraine-style revolutionary plot hatched by foreign conspirators from “both the West and from the East,” who are intent on fomenting unrest in Belarus.
 
Former aide Alexander Feduta, now a political analyst, has warned that Lukashenko is ready to use force to stay in power. The arrests are an indication of that, he says.
 
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France has weathered multiple crises in recent years: terrorism, yellow protests, and now, coronavirus. Successive governments champion the country’s revolution-era moniker as the land of human rights – but critics say they don’t always live by it. That includes the response to COVID-19. For VOA, Lisa Bryant reports from Paris.
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An American man was among three people killed in a stabbing incident in the British town of Reading on Saturday, the U.S. ambassador to Britain confirmed Monday, without naming the individual. Ambassador Woody Johnson tweeted that he offered his “deepest condolences to the families of those killed in the attack on June 20”, adding that one of the victims was an American citizen.   “Our thoughts are with all those affected,” Johnson wrote. “We condemn the attack absolutely and have offered our assistance to British law enforcement.” British police said a 25-year-old local man was arrested at the scene and was believed to be the lone attacker and the incident is being treated as a terrorism-related, now under investigating by the counter-terrorism police. Three other people were seriously wounded in the stabbing attack in Forbury Gardens park in Reading, a town with a population of 200,000 people, located about 65 kilometers west of London. The Philadelphia Inquirer has named the American killed as Joe Ritchie-Bennett, 39, who had moved to Britain about 15 years ago.   The paper has quoted his father, Robert Ritchie, as saying that his son initially worked for a London law firm and in the past 10 years worked for a Dutch pharmaceutical company with its British headquarters in Reading. 
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Serbia’s Progressive Party and its coalition partners won over 60% of the vote in Sunday’s elections, boycotted by major opposition parties. President Aleksandar Vucic, the party leader, told jubilant supporters that he did not expect such a landslide victory.  “I have long been in politics, but I have never experienced such a moment. Tonight we have gained the tremendous trust of the people, the biggest ever in Serbia, under conditions where not many believed in it. We got a warning from the people that we have to be even more responsible, more serious, more diligent and that we have to make best possible results for our people and our citizens,” Vucic said.In the new parliament, the Serbian Progressive Party will hold about 190 out of 250 total seats. “We have won everywhere, where we have been losing (before). We have won in every place abroad, where we have never been winning in the past,” Vucic said.Serbia became the first country in Europe Sunday to hold general elections during the COVID-19 pandemic.   The elections, initially scheduled for April, were postponed because of the coronavirus outbreak.   The turnout among the 6.6 million voters eligible to cast ballots for the 250 seats in parliament and for local governing bodies was lower than in previous elections. Several main opposition parties boycotted the vote, claiming a lack of free and fair conditions and accusing Vucic of dominating the election campaign through his control of the mainstream media. Vucic denied the accusations.  However, some smaller groups decided to participate, saying the boycott would only help Vucic’s party.  
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Ratcheting up fresh pressure, Greece has blasted the British Museum for exhibiting the Parthenon marbles, calling the collection “stolen” treasures and demanding the masterpieces be returned to Athens. The call comes as Greece celebrates the 11th anniversary of the New Acropolis Museum, a four-story, state of the art edifice built to house the ancient treasures and weaken Britain’s claim that it is best able to look after the 2,500-year-old masterpieces. 
 
“Since September 2003 when construction work for the Acropolis Museum began, Greece has systematically demanded the return of the sculptures on display in the British Museum because they are the product of theft,” the country’s culture minister Lina Mendoni said. “The current Greek government – like any Greek government – is not going to stop claiming the stolen sculptures which the British Museum, contrary to any moral principle, continues to hold illegally,” she told the Athens daily Ta Nea. 
 
Depicting figures of ancient Greek mythology, the 75-meter frieze and its 17 statues were sawed off the Parthenon temple and shipped to London by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century, during his tenure as Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. 
 
Bankrupted by the venture, the British aristocrat sold them to the British Museum in 1816, where they became a major attraction and began one of the world’s longest running cultural disputes. 
 
Mendoni said “It is sad that one of the world’s largest and most important museums is still governed by outdated, colonialist views.” While successive governments in Britain have opposed calls for the return of the sculptures to Greece, pressure has mounted in recent years with a bandwagon of celebrities and politicians joining the repatriation campaign. 
 
Greece’s center-right government is also stepping up efforts to win back the treasures as the country gears up for its bicentennial independence anniversary next year.A municipal worker wearing a protective suit sprays disinfectant outside Acropolis museum as the Parthenon temple is seen in the background in Athens on March 24, 2020.While 50 meters of the 115-block Parthenon frieze is displayed in Athens, eight other museums scattered across Europe house fragments of it, including the Louvre and the British Museum. 
 
Last year, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis secured a key agreement from French President Macron to allow the Louvre to lend a small fragment of the Parthenon in light of those celebrations. 
 
Macron has become the first Western leader to initiate a comprehensive review of colonial looting, repatriating significant collections to Africa – a move traditionally resisted by leading museums in the West, including the British Museum. 
 
A similar loan request was made to the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson but it was quickly knocked down by the British Museum, saying any swap would require Athens to relinquish ownership claims to the prized treasures — a request Greece has emphatically refused. 
 
“Without the supreme symbol of culture, the Parthenon, Western Civilization cannot exist, and this symbol deserves to be reunited with its expatriate sculptures,” Mendoni told a local broadcaster in May. 
 
Government officials have refused to clarify whether Athens has followed up with any alternative proposal to the British Museum. Nor have they said whether Greece would resort to legal action against Britain in a bid to win back the marbles. 
 
“In law, a thief is not allowed to keep his or her ill-gotten gains, no matter how long ago they were taken, or how much he or she may have improved them,” said Geoffrey Robertson, a leading human rights attorney whom the government in Athens recruited in 2014 to consider legal action. 
 
“In the past, a lot of cultural property was wrongfully extracted from places that are now independent states. They want the loot sent back to where it was created and to the people for whom it has most meaning.” 
 
In its pamphlets, the British Museum argues that its free-of-charge entrance attracts millions of visitors every year from around the work, making the ancient Greek masterpieces available to the public within the context of a wide swath of human civilization — a claim Greece insists is now defunct with its $200 million mammoth museum. 
 
An austere building wedged within the chaotic sprawl of a crowded old neighborhood, the new Acropolis museum was initially scheduled to open in time for the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics. 
 
But legal fights over the expropriation of some 25 buildings, as well as archaeological findings unearthed at the site, derailed the project by more than 5 years. 
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Delegations from the United States and Russia meet in Vienna, Austria Monday and Tuesday to discuss their nuclear arsenals after more than a year’s pause. President Donald Trump has abandoned several U.S. treaties with Russia, including ones on overflights and on intermediate-range nuclear forces. Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control Ambassador Marshall Billingslea is leading the U.S. delegation that will meet with their Russian counterparts led by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov in Vienna. They are to discuss mutually agreed topics related to the future of arms control, the State Department said in a statement last week. Trump has said China should be involved in the talks on New START, arguing that up until now Beijing has done as it liked in developing its weapon systems. “The United States has extended an open invitation to the People’s Republic of China to join these discussions, and has made clear the need for all three countries to pursue arms control negotiations in good faith,” the State Department statement said.  The Chinese government has refused the invitation with its Foreign Ministry saying earlier this month that “the time is not yet ripe for China to participate in nuclear disarmament negotiations.” Billingslea replied in a tweet: “China … should reconsider. Achieving Great Power status requires behaving with Great Power responsibility. No more Great Wall of Secrecy on its nuclear buildup. Seat waiting for China in Vienna.” The U.S.-Russia New START treaty agreed upon in 2010 limits each side to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads. It expires in February 2021. Arms experts say the time is too tight to renew a complex deal between the United States and Russia, let alone to negotiate and craft a new treaty involving China, with the U.S. presidential election is quickly approaching.  
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One of the coldest places on Earth on Saturday became one of the hottest places on Earth. A Russian heat wave sent the thermometer in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk soaring to 38 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit). Meteorologists say that would be the highest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle.  Verkhoyansk is about 10 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. Temperatures in the town average 40 degrees below zero Celsius (-40 Fahrenheit) in winter, and it rarely gets warmer than 20 degrees (68 Fahrenheit) in summer.  Experts blame the unusual heat wave on a massive high-pressure system that has been stalled over Siberia for almost two weeks, preventing cooler air from flowing south. All of Russia has experienced an uncharacteristically warm winter and spring this year with average temperatures breaking records in the first five months of the year set in 2016.  
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Serbia’s ruling conservative party led by President Aleksandar Vucic is set for a landslide win in Sunday’s parliamentary election, results projected by Ipsos and CeSID pollsters showed.The projection shows the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) on track to win 62.5% of the votes, while the Socialist party, a junior coalition partner in the outgoing government, is seen coming in second with 10.7% of the votes.The center-right Serbian Patriotic Alliance led by former water polo player Aleksandar Sapic is seen in third place with 4% of the votes.A brass band orchestra at the SNS headquarters was playing traditional Serbian music before Vucic proclaimed victory.Dozens of smiling people crammed into a small room, hugged each other and few had their faces covered with masks, despite doctors warning to be cautious to avoid spreading the coronavirus.”Tonight people showed enormous trust in our team,” Vucic told journalists. “Serbian people have decided what kind of future they want.”Another Serbian pollster CRTA saw turnout at 48% compared to 56.7% in 2016. The State Election Commission is to announce preliminary results including turnout later in the evening.Turnout was hit by a boycott by some opposition parties, who say the vote will not be free or fair owing to Vucic’s grip on the media.Florian Bieber, a Balkan expert at Austria’s University of Graz, tweeted after seeing results: “It is a pyrrhic victory, without opposition in parliament the election is discredited and its rule less legitimate than ever before.”Voters largely back efforts by Vucic’s ruling coalition to push for Serbian membership of the European Union while maintaining strong ties with Russia and China.But the future government will face increasing EU and U.S. pressure to recognize the independence of Serbia’s former province of Kosovo, a move seen as key for regional stability.Serbia, which has a population of 7.2 million, has reported 12,894 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 261 deaths. It was among the first European countries to start opening its borders on May 22 and all lockdown curbs have since been lifted.Analysts and pollsters said that health concerns kept some voters at home, especially among higher-risk groups. About 1.2 million people on the electoral list have lived abroad for years and are unlikely to vote.”If we take into account number of votes (the SNS got) … we are heading to a North Korean or Chinese system,” said Slobodan Zecevic, a lecturer of international law with the Belgrade-based European University.   
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The coronavirus pandemic has prevented druids, pagans and party-goers from watching the sun rise at Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice this year.The ancient stone circle in southwestern England usually draws thousands of people to mark the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. But Britain has banned mass gatherings as part of measures to contain the spread of COVID-19.English Heritage, the body that oversees Stonehenge, livestreamed the sunrise instead. It said more than 3.6 million people watched as dawn broke at 4:52 a.m. Sunday (0352GMT, 11:52 p.m. EDT Saturday).Stonehenge, a World Heritage site, is believed to be 4,500 years old. It is known for its alignment with the movements of the sun.Some dedicated druids were determined to watch the sun rise in person, gathering in a field near Stonehenge despite the morning rain. Well-known druid King Arthur Pendragon said it had been “very wet,” but he was undaunted.“You can’t cancel the sunrise,” he told the BBC. “It’s going to happen, and we were there to celebrate it.” 
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Vladimir Putin is considering running for a new term as Russia’s president if voters approve constitutional changes that would enable him to do so, Russian news agencies quoted him as saying in an interview on Sunday.Russia will hold a nationwide vote from June 25 to July 1 on proposed changes to the constitution, including an amendment that would allow Putin to seek two more six-year terms as president when his current mandate ends in 2024.Opponents say the reforms are designed to allow Putin to keep power until 2036 and amount to a constitutional coup. The Kremlin says they are needed to strengthen the role of parliament and improve social policy and public administration.”I do not rule out the possibility of running for office, if this (option) comes up in the constitution. We’ll see,” Putin was quoted as saying in an interview with state TV that was shown in Russia’s far east before airing in western Russia. “I have not decided anything for myself yet.”The changes that Russians will vote on, already approved by parliament and the Constitutional Court, would reset Putin’s presidential term tally to zero. He would not be able to seek a new term under current constitutional limits.The changes are widely expected to be approved in the vote.Putin, who has been in power for two decades and is now 67, suggested the hunt for a candidate to succeed him could become a distraction if he does not run again.”If this doesn’t happen, then in about two years – and I know this from personal experience – the normal rhythm of work of many parts of government will be replaced by a search for possible successors,” Interfax news agency cited him as saying.”We must be working, not looking for successors,” he said. 
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