Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Sweden, with this week's Europe In (more than) 60 Seconds

So what's really going on in Belarus and where is it likely to end?

Well, I wish I knew where it's going to end, I don't.

But look at the background first, briefly, what is Belarus?

Well, it's nine million people situated on the plains of Central Europe. It's an area that historically has been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for a long time. But of course, during the last few centuries, has been part of Russia or the Soviet Union. It was a fairly docile and uninteresting Soviet republic, very much destroyed in the horrors of the Second World War, where a lot of the fighting, the major fighting was on the territory of what is today Belarus, with the Holocaust and German and Soviet armies and all of those horrors, and rebuilt in Soviet style to a certain extent, if you look at Minsk. Then when the Soviet Union fell, Alexander Lukashenko, who had been running a collective farm, took over and has been running it since then. I think he was winning elections genuinely in the beginning, no question about that. But in their later decades, he has been falsifying elections and he has been ruling by repression. That works for a while and now it doesn't work any longer. He probably thought that he could repeat that performance this time. Falsification, 80%, he said. No one believes that. And then an amount of repression and then go back to business as usual. That did not work. That did not work. Things have changed.