Belarus

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Belarus ([]/[], or , German rare Belorus; Officially or , German transcription Respublika Belarus [] for , in the German-speaking area also Belarus, is an Eastern European landlocked state. The political and economic center is the city of Minsk. Belarus borders Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Ukraine and Poland.

The country emerged in 1991 from the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, which became independent due to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Since 1994, Aliaksandr Lukashenka (mostly written in the German-speaking world according to the Russian transcription) has been the authoritarian and repressive president of Belarus, which is why the country has often been called the “last dictatorship of Europe”. The alleged falsification of the presidential election in Belarus in 2020 was followed by weeks of nationwide protests and strikes against Lukashenka’s government. The demonstrations were crushed with extreme brutality. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said in September 2020 that it had received reports of over 450 documented cases of torture and ill-treatment. Since then, protests have eased, but the human rights situation has worsened.

Country name

Fundamentals
The country name Belarus is composed of the components bela- (Slavic for "white") and rus (name of the medieval East Slavic dominion). There are different theories about the etymology of the word Rus and the historical significance of bela- in this context. The predominant view is that Rus derives from the Old Finnish rūōtsi ("rowers") and refers to the Scandinavian Varangians; bela- is considered part of a system for the designation of cardinal directions with the help of colors (cf. also names such as Black Rus or the Red Rus / Red Rus), the color white refers to the West of the former Kiev Rus.

The name Belaja Rus can be found in the sources since 13. Proof of the century. Rus was the East Slavic name for Scandinavian-Slavic dominions such as that of Kiev Rus, to which the area belonged since the 9th century.

The historical German denominations for the Rus were Russia, Reussia or Ruthenia, however, from the middle of the 20th century onwards, In the 19th century, the form Rus was adopted directly from the Eastern Slavic languages. The term Alba Russia (White Rus) has long been assigned in medieval sources to various parts of the Rus: the Republic of Novgorod, the Grand Duchy of Moscow or the eastern part of the present-day territory of Belarus, as opposed to Black Rus for the area around Grodno. The color pair was also often used for different areas and in different meanings, until the term Belarus in the 19th century established a firm reference to the ethnic settlement space of that part of Russia