After rallies in the capital, Minsk, drew 100,000 people, the authorities arrested two more opposition activists and summoned others for questioning.
Security forces in Belarus on Monday arrested two of the last high-profile opposition figures not already in jail for protesting against the country’s authoritarian president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko. The arrests came as a senior United States diplomat met with the embattled president’s most prominent opponent, who fled the country under duress earlier this month. In the first publicly acknowledged high-level contact between the U. S. government and the Belarusian opposition, U. S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen E. Biegun met in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, with Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Mr. Lukashenko’s main rival in the disputed presidential election on Aug.9 that triggered mass protests. Ms. Tikhanovskaya claimed victory in the election. Mr. Lukashenko, pointing to official results that his opponents and European leaders called fraudulent, insists he won by a landslide. She fled to Lithuania a week ago after security agents in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, detained her and forced her to make a video urging people not to protest the election result. The dangers that awaited her had she stayed in Belarus were evident on Monday, when riot police officers seized Olga Kovalkova, an ally of Ms. Tikhanovskaya, and Sergei Dylevsky, a strike leader at a tractor factory in Minsk. Both were seized in front of the Minsk Tractor Works, a vast, Soviet-era plant whose workers, long viewed as loyal supporters of the government, last week threatened to go on strike unless Mr. Lukashenko stepped down. Two other activists were told to report for questioning by the country’s investigative committee in a criminal case against the opposition’s coordinating council. One of them was the Nobel Prize-winning writer Svetlana Alexievich, a member of the council. Defying expectations that the protest movement might be losing steam in the face of a violent crackdown by Mr. Lukashenko, more than 100,000 people flooded into Minsk on Sunday, calling for the president to step down after 26 years in power. Mr. Lukashenko, famous for his displays of macho bravado, responded by appearing outside his presidential palace waving an automatic rifle.
