For the past couple of weeks, the Eastern European country of Belarus has been gripped

by political protest.

People filled the capital city's plazas to reject the August 9th re-election of Belarus's long-time president, Alexander Lukashenko.

The EU has called that election a sham.

In this video, a middle-aged woman says,

I came out here because of the injustice, the endless lies.

Police and security forces have been rounding up protesters, beating them,

stuffing them into overcrowded holding cells.

The harrowing audio files of the sounds of torture coming from the Ocrestina prison shared across

the nation soundtrack to its trauma.

State TV showed Lukashenko surveying the protests from a helicopter and AK-47 in hand.

Lukashenko is stocky, with thinning white hair and a Tom Selleck mustache.

Lukashenko wasn't always such a central casting strongman.

In 1994, he was a political outsider.

The man backed by the protesters, not reviled by them. He was an anti-corruption crusader when he came to power, just a few years after the Soviet Union fell apart.

He was young, dashing, that mustache looked good.

Julia Yafi writes for GQ magazine. She's been covering Russia and former Soviet states like

Belarus for years. You know, what he promised to Belarusians was, I'm going to get all

these old guys from the old regime, the old kind of Soviet holdovers, going to get them out. I'm going to clean house and we're going to march forward into the bright and promising future.

Now he represents the old guard that the bright and promising future is threatening to remove from power.

Julia says Russia, Belarus's neighbor to the east, has been watching the growing demonstrations

closely.

...