In Belarus, the regime is cutting ties with western states.

As the German Foreign Office announced on Wednesday evening, the Goethe Institute and the German Academic Foreign Service have to stop their work in Belarus.

"This step will help isolate Belarus further internationally," said the ministry in Berlin, calling on the regime to "enter into a serious and inclusive national dialogue and respond to the legitimate demands of the protest movement."

Friedrich Schmidt

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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    Meanwhile, dictator Alexandr Lukashenko does not move away from his course of brutal severity against his opponents.

    The action against the German representatives is obviously a reaction to the sanctions that the EU imposed last week to punish the forced landing of the Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius in Minsk in May, which the regime of the journalist and activist Roman Protasevich itself is through and seized his girlfriend Sofija Sapega;

    Both were allegedly transferred to house arrest from pre-trial detention last week.

    Support from Putin

    The most recent EU punitive measures are the harshest yet and affect essential areas of the Belarusian economy. As a result, Minsk ordered its ambassador back to the EU, announced an entry ban against (unnamed) EU representatives and suspended its participation in the EU's Eastern Partnership, which was largely symbolic.

    In addition, the ministry announced that it would withdraw from the visa and readmission agreement with the EU, which was only concluded in early 2020; According to the plans, the EU wanted to pay Belarus seven million euros to build a camp for rejected migrants in the country. Now the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has threatened that the suspension will "have a negative impact on cooperation with the EU in the fight against illegal migration and organized crime". But in fact, according to Lithuanian information, the regime has been smuggling migrants into the neighboring country for weeks. Hundreds of people are said to have reached Lithuania and Poland in this way. The regime has also asked the EU ambassador in Minsk to return to Brussels for “consultations”; diplomats do not reject such requests.

    Lukashenko received support on Thursday from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who, according to the Kremlin, promised the dictator “solidarity” against the “unilateral illegitimate restrictions” of the West. Lukashenko said during a Russian-Belarusian regional forum, "we will not only withstand these attacks that are being made against our states": Belarus and Russia would expand their cooperation and "make our states absolutely independent".