Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday delivered the Bush administration`s strongest rebuke of Russia to date. He said the Russian government "unfairly and improperly restricted" people`s rights and suggested that it sought to undermine its neighbors and to use the country`s vast resources of oil and gas as "tools of intimidation or blackmail."

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A judge of the Pervomaisky District Court in Minsk on May 4 announced a break in the trial of opposition graffitist Artur Finkevich until May 10 as the local housing maintenance authority still failed to substantiate with proper documentation the alleged amount of the damage caused by the accused. The authority claimed that the damage from the inscription of “We want a new one [president]!” on a building wall totaled 35,196,970 rubels ($16,370). Judge Viktoriya Zaitseva found the damage overestimated.

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The trial of youth opposition leader Nikita Sasim, originally scheduled for May 4, has been postponed until May 11, opposition activist Kristina Shatikova told BelaPAN.

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More than 20 young people were arrested by plainclothesmen at a media exhibition in Minsk on Thursday. A dozen of them were grabbed and put into a minibus outside the BelExpo exhibition center a minute after they opened copies of the pro-opposition newspapers Tovarishch, Narodnaya Volya and Nasha Niva beside the stall of the largest government-controlled paper Sovetskaya Belorussiya at 3:30 p.m.

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Vilnius, 4 May. Douglas Alexander, the UK’s minister of state for Europe, condemned the harassment of opposition activists in Belarus and called on the country’s authorities to abide by its international commitments to democracy.

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More than 20 young people were arrested by plainclothesmen at a media exhibition in Minsk on Thursday. A dozen of them were grabbed and put into a minibus outside the BelExpo exhibition center a minute after they opened copies of the pro-opposition newspapers Tovarishch, Narodnaya Volya and Nasha Niva beside the stall of the largest government-controlled paper Sovetskaya Belorussiya at 3:30 p.m.

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Pavel Mozheiko, spokesman for opposition leader Aleksandr Milinkevich, was allowed to travel to Poland on the evening of May 3.

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The support of the European community cannot but inspire the Belarusians to fight against the dictatorship, Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus said in his closing speech at a high-level international conference in Vilnius on Thursday.

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The speaker of Poland’s upper parliamentary house said that strained relations between Warsaw and Minsk can thaw only after the latter officially recognizes Anzelika Borys as the head of the Union of Belarusian Poles (UBP).

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Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Borys Tarasyuk stressed that although Kyiv shares international criticism of Belarus’ human rights record, it does not affect fast-developing bilateral economic relations. The minister was among a few top Ukrainian officials who attended an international forum in Vilnius focusing on a wide range of issues, including the situation in Belarus.

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