Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s longest-serving leader, has extended his 31-year rule in Belarus after being declared the winner of a presidential election that his exiled opponents and Western countries have denounced as a sham.

Europe’s longest-serving leader won re-election in a contest widely believe to have been rigged. The result cements the power of a leader whose country is considered Russia’s staunchest ally.

Having visited the polling stations, I can say that people make informed choices, independent observer, former member of Spain's Congress of Deputies Angeles Maestro said.

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union rejected the election in Belarus on Sunday as illegitimate and threatened new sanctions. Belarus held an orchestrated vote virtually guaranteed to give 70-year-old autocratic President Alexander Lukashenko yet another term on top of his three decades in power.

As an East African bloc urged an immediate ceasefire in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwandan-backed M23 rebels who seized the city of Goma extended their advance on Wednesday, and Congo said it planned a campaign to recover lost territory.

Five years after widespread protests tried and failed to topple Alexander Lukashenko, he has once again been re-elected as President of Belarus. According to the official result, Lukashenko received a resounding victory with 87 percent of the vote. But no one really believes it.

The election of the President of the Republic of Belarus is recognised as valid, with Aleksandr Lukashenko winning the largest number of votes — as stated by Chairman of Belarus’ Central Election Commission Igor Karpenko at a press conference on the preliminary results of the Presidential election in Belarus.

Belarus is on the brink of extending the 30-year rule of its authoritarian leader, President Alexander Lukashenko, who is poised to secure a seventh term in a presidential election slated for January 2025.

"Many joint and national forces continue to be stationed near the borders of Belarus and Russia, and they are only intensifying their military activity, scale, and joint exercises," Andrey Serdyukov s

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has stated that the so-called presidential "elections" in Belarus on 26 January 2025 do not meet international standards and that there are no grounds to recognise Alexander Lukashenko as the legitimate president of Belarus.

Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko is all but certain to extend his more than three decades in power in Sunday’s election that is rejected by the opposition as a farce after years o