On February 25th 2024, Belarus will hold its first elections since August 2020, which resulted in mass protests for several months. How are the Belarusian authorities preparing for this event and what will be the likely outcome?

In the years that followed the controversial 2020 election – a resounding Lukashenka “victory” of over 80 per cent which bore little relation to the popular support for the challenger Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya – the ruling regime has undergone several serious trials to which it has responded ever more harshly. Its recent measures have included the elimination of the opposition’s media sites, the shutdown of hundreds of civil society organisations and the dissolution of all opposition and several official political parties.

The 2020 elections took place in the middle of a pandemic, dismissed by the president as a "psychosis". They were the first elections to be contested by other sectors of the Belarusian elite. Since that day, the situation has changed. Over 38,000 people have been arrested, and over 500 have been declared political prisoners. Peaceful protesters, peaking in numbers at around 250,000 in Minsk but significant in all cities, have been arrested, tortured and in several cases, murdered. What comes next remains an open question.

On August 9th 2021, Alyaksandr Lukashenka held a press conference to discuss the events of the previous year. It was attended by both local and foreign journalists. The de facto leader of Belarus fielded questions in his own style and according to his own perceptions – or stated perceptions – of the world. He expressed his views on the so-called All-Belarusian People's Assembly, on the change of president in the United States and in general about the West's vendetta against his rule, as well as the attacks on his security forces by protesters.

For the past decade, both Ukraine and Belarus have been members of the European Union’s Eastern Partnership Project (EaP). Has it been a useful tool for the EU in drawing these countries closer? Have its initial and long-term aims been fulfilled? Is it a project that is worth continuing?

The debate on the extent and nature of the Soviet famine in pre-war Ukraine, continues to engage researchers from both Ukraine and the West.

Spring 2016 marked 30 years since the Chernobyl accident of April 26th 1986. The explosion at the fourth unit of the Chernobyl V.I. Lenin plant, which occurred during an experiment on safety equipment, contaminated about a tenth of the country as well as most of Belarus, parts of western Russia and many areas of Europe, especially mountain regions.

The word “decommunisation” has become a familiar one in Ukrainian society. It is a means of fulfilling the mandate of the so-called Memory Laws of the spring of 2015, and the programme of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance (UINR), founded originally in 2006, but organised in its current form as subordinate to the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers in November 2014. The process has involved the removal of Lenin statues, of other statues linked to the Soviet period as well as Soviet symbols and monuments. It also entails changes of names in cities, towns, and streets and their replacement with more acceptable ones not linked to the Communist period.