Europe’s Foreign Ministers agreed on Monday to sanction Belarus’ long-time ruler Aleksander Lukashenko along with other senior Belarusian officials over a violent crackdown on protesters demonstrating against August 9 “rigged” elections.

“Today, Ministers reconfirmed that Mr Lukashenko lacks any democratic legitimacy and gave their political green light to start preparing the next , which will include Lukashenko himself,” EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell said in a statement on Monday.

Lukashenko, who is currently running his sixth term in power, was not included in EU’s sanctions list that was agreed during an extraordinary summit on October 2, despite mounting calls by politicians, human rights activists and Belarus opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. Under the Foreign Affairs Council’s (FAC) conclusions, Lukashenko will be targeted with a travel ban and his assets will be frozen. 

“This is an answer to the evolving situation in Belarus,” the bloc’s foreign policy chief told reporters following the foreign ministers’ meeting in Luxembourg. He added that Lukashenko had showed no signal “to engage in any kind of conversation.”

The bloc’s foreign ministers also decided to scale back their financial support to Belarus and support the Belarusian people and civil society instead, in particular the victims of violence, civil society organisations and independent media.

Ahead of the meeting, Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas for Lukashenko to be included in the bloc’s list of individuals under EU sanctions, as renewed violence in the country could not be ignored.

The German FM supported that since the EU27 leaders 40 Belarusian individuals responsible for falsifying the August 9 election results and for the violent attacks and unlawful arrests of demonstrators, “nothing has improved.”

The Foreign Ministers’ move followed a fresh crackdown on protesters, as on Sunday, some 586 people, including at least 40 journalists, were detained by Belarusian security forces, a day after Lukashenko met with detained opposition leaders to discuss plans for constitutional reforms.

“We will continue to march peacefully and persistently and demand what is ours: new free and transparent elections”, Tikhanovskaya wrote on her Telegram channel.