By suppressing opposition through harsh police actions and keeping much of the country's economy under state control, Lukashenko has made Belarus a neo-Soviet outlier, wary of its thriving NATO and European Union neighbours. People attend an opposition rally in Minsk in September 2020 to protest the presidential election results and the inauguration of Lukashenko.(Reuters) Who is Roman Protasevich? The 26-year-old dissident journalist has been an anti-Lukashenko voice since he was a teen. His protest activities got him expelled from school and later from the Belarusian State University, where he studied journalism. He was named a Vaclav Havel journalism fellow in 2017-18, a joint program between Radio Free Europe and the Czech Foreign Affairs Ministry aimed at promoting more open societies through journalism.