Russian President Vladimir Putin suddenly sacked Moscow’s ambassador to Belarus, Mikhail Babich, the Kremlin said on Tuesday, amid a row over contaminated oil and a wider political discord between the ex-Soviet countries.
Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko has generally been more closely aligned with Moscow than any other ex-Soviet leader, while the lack of tolerance for dissent at home has made him largely a pariah in the West.
However, Minsk has shown increasing signs of seeking a thaw with the United States and the European Union since 2014, when Belarus did not recognize Russia’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula from neighboring Ukraine.
Lukashenko has …read more
Source: Voice of America
