An American citizen has been detained in Belarus after being accused of attempting to sneak into the country on a cargo train by Belarusian authorities. <\/p>\n
The 27-year-old unnamed American man was traveling in the empty carriage of a train from neighbouring Lithuania when he was found by custom officers at Maladzyechna <\/strong>train station, Belarus\u2019 customs authority said in a statement on Monday. <\/p>\n The man, identified as a \u201cborder violator,\u201d was promptly detained by customs officials before being handed over to the border service for further investigation, the statement said. <\/p>\n Earlier this year, the Trump administration secured the release of two US citizens who were being held prisoner in Belarus. One American, who was not named out of a request for his privacy, was among a group of three political prisoners freed in February, while Anastassia Nuhfer was released in January. <\/p>\n The state department has advised Americans not to travel to Belarus, citing the Belarusian authorities\u2019 arbitrary enforcement of local laws and the risk of detention as key factors. <\/p>\n Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko\u2019s government has long been accused of a crackdown on dissidents and opposition detaining scores of them. <\/p>\n Europe\u2019s longest-serving leader extended his 31-year rule in Belarus in January, with Lukashenko winning a presidential election that was widely denounced as a sham by his exiled opponents and Western countries. <\/p>\n Under the first Trump administration, the US had sought diplomatic rapprochement with Minsk. Those efforts were put aside after Lukashenka self-proclaimed electoral victory and massive crackdown on protesters and civil society in August 2020, which Trump administration officials condemned at the time. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An American citizen has been detained in Belarus after being accused of attempting to sneak…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15313,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}