The Kremlin said on Monday that it celebrated the victory of Russian ally Alexander Lukashenko in a presidential election in Belarus on Sunday and dismissed Western criticism of the vote as “predictable”.
Lukashenko, in power in Belarus since 1994, clinched 86.8% of the vote in an election which European politicians said was neither free nor fair.
Independent media are banned in the former Soviet republic and all leading opposition figures have either been jailed or forced to flee abroad.