Alexander Lukashenko has disappeared from public view after struggling during a visit to Moscow last week in which he skipped a lunch hosted by Russian president Vladimir Putin, prompting unconfirmed reports that the Belarus leader is in hospital.
The unexplained absences and public silence are highly out of character for a president who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist for almost three decades and rarely misses a chance to hold forth in public.
Lukashenko, 68, missed an annual ceremony in Minsk on Sunday where allegiance to the former Soviet state’s flag is celebrated. Prime Minister Roman Golovchenko read out a message on the president’s behalf.
Lukashenko last week cut short his participation in the Victory Day events in Moscow marking the Soviet Union’s victory in the second world war, during which Putin vowed to continue the conflict in Ukraine. Later that day, Lukashenko laid a wreath but otherwise stood silently in the background during Victory Day festivities back home in Minsk.
Konstantin Zatulin, a senior Russian lawmaker and deputy chair of the lower house’s former USSR committee, told Russian media on Sunday that Lukashenko was unwell.
“There’s nothing supernatural there, it’s not Covid. The man just got sick,” Zatulin said, according to Podyom, a channel on social media app Telegram. “But even though the man got sick, he thought it was a matter of duty to come to Moscow and then hold events in Minsk later that same day. He probably just needs a bit of rest — that’s all there is to it.”
Lukashenko was taken to a hospital near Belarus’s capital on Saturday evening, according to Euroradio and other independent Belarusian news outlets that did not cite their sources. The news has not been confirmed by the country’s state media.
Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, told reporters to “take your cue from official information” and did not comment on Lukashenko’s health directly. “There have been no such official statements from Minsk.”
Lukashenko has run Belarus since 1994 when he won his country’s first presidential election following the break-up of the Soviet Union. He has maintained his grip on the country despite the mass anti-government protests that followed a contested presidential election in 2020.
The authorities responded with a crackdown during which several opposition leaders who had denounced the poll result as a sham escaped Belarus to avoid arrest, including Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya who had replaced her detained husband Sergei Tikhanovsky as an election candidate. Tikhanovsky was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2021 for inciting “mass disturbances”.
Although they have had a long and sometimes volatile relationship, Lukashenko has been a staunch ally of Putin since the Russian president backed his efforts to crush the protests. He has since offered Belarus as a base for the Russian military to pursue its strikes against Ukraine and allowed Russia to deploy tactical nuclear weapons there later this year.
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