This article by Christopher Miller is published by BuzzfeedNews. Here is an excerpt:

Sipping orange juice on the terrace of a Central Park restaurant, far from the home she was forced to leave behind in Minsk, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya had a warning for President Joe Biden: If you can’t back my democratic movement with actions, autocrats around the world will take notice.

In a little over a year, Tikhanovskaya has gone from being a stay-at-home mother of two young children and a part-time English teacher to becoming the unlikely leader of the pro-democracy movement to unseat Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, the mustachioed man who has had an iron-fisted grip on power since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Belarusians’ yearlong fight for freedom, she said, represents the “world’s current struggle between autocracy and democracy.” That fight has been building in Europe for years, as authoritarian-leaning governments in Hungary and Poland have swept into power, for instance, and the US is still grappling with Trumpist forces working to undermine American democracy, challenging the results of last year’s election and facts surrounding the coronavirus pandemic.

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