Do we like Alexander Lukashenko?
Our score: 1 out of 10. He signed a 2026 law banning LGBTQ+ 'propaganda' and leads a government UN experts say targeted critics, with only pressured prisoner releases to set against it.
Lukashenko has run Belarus since 1994, which makes him one of Europe's longest-serving leaders. The Associated Press had him at 70 and winning a seventh term in January 2025, with an official 86.82 per cent of the vote. The reporting we could open says little about his early life, so this card is about the rule, not the backstory.
That 2025 vote is the pattern in miniature. The AP reported that his opponents were jailed or exiled, all four challengers were loyal to him, and about 500,000 Belarusians abroad couldn't vote. The EU said it was neither free nor fair. Lukashenko's own line was “It's better to have a dictatorship like in Belarus than a democracy like Ukraine.”
Then there's what happened to people who objected. UN experts told the Human Rights Council in September 2026 that courts, police, security services and prisons worked together against real or perceived critics from 2020 on. They documented arbitrary arrests, torture and closed trials, and said some abuses could amount to the crimes against humanity of persecution and imprisonment. Lukashenko denies holding political prisoners, calling them “bandits”, and says authorities acted lawfully.
On Ukraine, he told the AP in 2022 “We categorically do not accept any war.” VOA rated that false. It pointed to Russian troops and missiles using Belarusian territory from the war's first day. In February 2026 Ukraine sanctioned him for supporting Russia's invasion, and Russia says it is stationing Oreshnik missiles in Belarus.
The one thing on the other side of the ledger is the prisoner releases. In March 2026 he ordered 250 political prisoners freed as part of a deal with Washington to lift some US sanctions. Viasna still counted more than 1,100 held, and Belarus doesn't formally call them political. Freed people are freed people, but this looks like a bargain for sanctions relief, not a change of heart.
So the verdict is a clear no. He fails the harm test on his own signature on an anti-LGBTQ+ law, and fails the good-person test on a UN-documented pattern of going after critics, which he denies. A few hundred prisoners released for sanctions relief doesn't balance that. Nothing else we found speaks well of him.