On February 1, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka met with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Sochi. The meeting was not planned in advance: Lukashenka had reportedly only called his Russian counterpart on January 28 to request this engagement. This puzzled political commentators. After all, the two heads of state met on December 15 and then on December 21 in Moscow, and were further scheduled to meet again at the end of February, in Minsk, during the session of the Supreme Council of the Union State of Russia and Belarus (Svaboda.org, February 2; Regnum, February 5).
Most experts have hypothesized that this …read more
Source: The Jamestown Foundation