The United States has imposed a raft of visa restrictions on Belarusian officials over the government’s “continued repression” of opposition figures, including democracy icon Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski.
The restrictions announced on Tuesday target 25 individuals, bringing the total number of Belarussians facing US visa bars for “undermining democracy” to 322 since President Alexander Lukashenko was re-elected in 2020 in landslide polls dismissed by the opposition and foreign observers – including the US government and Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) – as a sham.
