Both Ukraine and Belarus have long-standing population worries even though the immediate circumstances are very different. The crises of recent years – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Belarus’s post-2020 political crisis – have only exacerbated those challenges. The EU ambitions of Ukraine and the Belarus opposition must therefore be handled with consideration of each country’s demographic outlook.

On February 25, 2024, the “single voting day” for the national parliament and local councils took place in Belarus. This was likely the least free election in the history of the nation. Politically sterile, with no opposition on the ballot or in the election commissions, Lukashenka is ushering in a process that the democratic opposition calls a “special operation.”

Just days after the breaking news of Alexei Navalny's death made global headlines, Belarusian independent media reported another tragedy that is similar in character but will likely cause much less attention. The political prisoner Ihar Lednik died in a hospital in Minsk after he had been incarcerated despite a known heart condition.

The Warwick Ukraine-Belarus (WUB) Hub is a new initiative building on the foundations of the Oxford Belarus Observatory. WUB Hub expands the earlier project’s coverage to include Ukraine and Ukrainians in its work, and it will grow through its events and collaborative activities with other institutions.