THE leader of the Belarusian opposition Svetlana Tikhanovskaya expects the European democracies to give greater hope and support to the people at home if the oppression there is to be ended.

European leaders must show Belarusians that they are not forgotten and that they belong to the democratic world, Tikhanovskaya said today at a forum in the Lithuanian parliament in Vilnius, BNS news agency reported.

According to Tikhanovksaya, who was driven into exile by authoritarian Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko in 2020, people who have been living under oppression for so many years need a “positive agenda”.

However, he said the leaders of democratic European countries were reluctant to send positive messages to the people of Belarus that they are welcome and that the door is open for them.

“The people of Belarus are disappointed by this,” said Tikhanovskaya, 41, who now lives in Lithuania.

Lukashenko has ruled the former Soviet republic since 1994 and is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. When he ran for re-election to the presidency for a sixth term in 2020, the opposition was convinced that his opponent, Tikhanovskaya, had actually won the election.

Lukashenko himself declared himself the winner, and the protests that followed were brutally suppressed. Like Tikhanovskaya, many members of the opposition have since lived in exile abroad.

“Everyone is a target of the regime because the regime wants to punish anyone who challenges the dictator,” Tikhanovskaya said at the forum in Vilnius.