Ο ambassador of France in Belarus, Nicolas de Buyan de Lacoste left the country, as demanded by Minsk, which had given him a deadline of today, Monday, his delegation announced yesterday, Sunday.
«Ambassador Nicolas de Lacoste left Belarus today,» a spokesperson for the embassy said.
The spokesperson did not explain why the Belarusian Foreign Ministry asked the French ambassador to leave the country.
According to Belarusian media, he was expelled because he never went to present his credentials to the president Alexander Lukashenko.
In a statement posted on its website, the French Embassy in Belarus confirmed that the diplomat had submitted, on December 8, 2020, «a signed copy of his credentials» to Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei.
«The Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs requested that the ambassador leave before October 18,» according to the spokesperson for the French diplomatic mission.
«He said goodbye to the staff and recorded a video message for the Belarusian people, which will be uploaded tomorrow (i.e., today, Monday) to the embassy’s website,» she added.
France—like other European Union countries—does not recognize the results of the presidential election held on August 9, 2020, in which the 67-year-old head of state secured his sixth consecutive term. The election, which the opposition alleged was marred by widespread fraud, sparked unprecedented mass protests in the former Soviet republic, an ally of Russia of Vladimir Putin.
The EU and the U.S. have imposed a series of sanctions on Mr. Lukashenko's government in response to the crackdown on the opposition.
But the head of state, who accuses Western governments of instigating the protests in the hope that they would spark an uprising, is resisting the sanctions with Moscow’s support and funding.
Belarus has also severed ties with others who were previously its partners in dialogue in the West.
In March, it expelled the entire staff of the Latvian embassy, including the ambassador, because the Latvian authorities displayed a flag of the Belarusian opposition during an ice hockey game.
In August, it withdrew its consent to the appointment of U.S. Ambassador Julie Fischer, which had been confirmed in December. She would have been the first U.S. ambassador to the former Soviet republic to take up the post since 2008.
Since then, the authorities have been able to put an end to the protests by imprisoning hundreds of opposition activists and shutting down dozens of media outlets and NGOs. Opposition leaders were all either imprisoned or forced into exile.
Last month, a court sentenced one of the leading figures of the Belarusian opposition, Maria Kalesnikova, to 11 years in prison.
She was the only one of the organizers of last year’s protests—in which even hundreds of thousands of citizens took part—who remained in the country.
Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya, whom the opposition and the West consider the winner of the election in which she faced off against Alexander Lukashenko, has been exiled to neighboring Lithuania.
In the year following the elections, he reached out to foreign leaders, calling on the international community to exert pressure to ensure that a new vote was held in Belarus.
