US President Joe Biden met with Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlan Cihanouska at the White House in Washington on Wednesday and expressed support for Belarus’s democratic aspirations.
“I had the honor of meeting Cihanoouska at the White House this morning,” Biden said on Twitter.
“The United States is with the people of Belarus in its quest for democracy and universal human rights,” he said.
During the visit, Cihanoouska has already met with the most important foreign policy people of the Biden administration – Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jacob Salivan.
According to the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, referring to the participants in the talks, the next US sanctions against the regime of the authoritarian leader of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko were discussed during the visit of Cihanouska, and they may affect the potassium and oil sectors.
Belarus was taken over by mass protests, with hundreds of thousands of people outraged by the rigging of the results, reportedly following the August 9 presidential election in Belarus, in which long-term President Lukashenko was once again the winner.
The protests were brutally suppressed by the authorities and gradually subsided by the winter.
Tens of thousands of people were detained during the protests. Hundreds of protesters were injured, but several were also killed.
Lukashenko’s rival, Cihanouska, who the opposition believes is the real winner of the election, was forced to leave the country. Most of the other opposition leaders are also in prison or exile.-
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