“He’s finished! No one can come back from this.” After a week of protests following the Aug. 9 presidential election, Belarusians are starting to believe that Aleksandr Lukashenko may finally be out of luck. The messages to me have been coming thick and fast all week—via encrypted messaging apps such as Signal, just in case. Lukashenko had claimed victory against his challenger, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, a schoolteacher and the wife of a former presidential candidate, in a vote many Belarusians—and the democratic world—deem fraudulent.
On Sunday, tens of thousands of protesters gathered in central Minsk, demanding Lukashenko resign. For his part, an increasingly desperate Lukashenko held his own sparsely attended rally. What unfolded was just surreal. “Do you want freedom?” he roared. “No!” answered a crowd of several hundred. “Do you want change?” “No!” “Do you want reforms?” “No!”
