A landlocked republic between EU neighbours and Russia
Belarus is a landlocked Eastern European country of 9.1 million people spread over 207,600 square kilometres between Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Independent since 25 August 1991, it has been ruled since 1994 by Alexander Lukashenko and is one of only three European states outside the Council of Europe.
Baltic tribes first settled the region permanently in the third century, and Slavs took over around the fifth. By the ninth century it lay within Kievan Rus', and the Battle on the Nemiga River in 1067 is counted as the founding date of Minsk. Principalities such as Polotsk largely escaped the worst of the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion and, around 1300, came fully under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, whose forces fought beside Poland against the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald in 1410.
A royal marriage in 1386 tied Lithuania to Poland, a bond formalised as the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569. Polish and Catholicism came to dominate public life, and from 1696 Polish displaced Ruthenian in official use, though peasants kept their own speech. The partitions of 1792–1795 placed the lands in the Russian Empire for the first time. Nicholas I banned Belarusian from public schools in the 1840s, and after Konstanty Kalinowski's failed revolt of 1863, no documents in Belarusian were permitted until 1905.
The name derives from Belaya Rus', White Rus'. One theory holds that it marked early-Christianised Slavic lands, as opposed to Black Ruthenia, home to pagan Balts; another points to the white clothing locals wore. A chronicle records Jogaila's imprisonment in 1381 at a place called White Russia, identified with Polotsk, and the Englishman Jerome Horsey first applied White Russia to the country in the late sixteenth century. Byelorussia remained the official form until 1991, and Lithuanians also call it Gudija.
Parliament proclaimed sovereignty on 27 July 1990. After a new constitution in 1994, Lukashenko won what remains the country's only free election since independence, and he has led a highly centralised authoritarian government ever since; Belarus scores poorly on press freedom and civil liberties. A founding member of the United Nations, it belongs to the CIS, the CSTO and the Eurasian Economic Union. Its 1993 bid to join the Council of Europe was refused over electoral malpractice and human rights concerns.
Source: Belarus
