Belarus’s Struggle to Escape Its Soviet Past Pushes It Into Russia’s Embrace

The lengthy rule of Alexander Lukashenko, the embattled president of Belarus, has remaining his state economically depleted and reliant on Russia, mainly trapped in its Soviet-period past and probably certain to Moscow for many decades to appear.

Mr. Lukashenko, Belarus’s president for 26 decades and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has presided around a leading-down political and financial procedure that he tightly controls, with a lot of the economic climate nevertheless in the fingers of the point out.