The US has expanded sanctions against Belarus, imposing sanctions on 44 entities for the role that they played during the presidential elections.

““The Belarusian people continually seek to peacefully exercise their basic democratic rights, and the state repeatedly responds with violent crackdowns,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.

The individual sanctions target Belarus’s Deputy Minister of the Interior and Chief of the Criminal Police Henadz Arkadzievich Kazakevich (Kazakevich), who is blamed for the actions of the Criminal Police in their role in carrying out a violent crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Belarus. 

The Treasury Department further targeted for sanctions the Belarusion CEC, the central commission charged with carrying out elections, for undermining the August elections, and identified three other entities as helping perpetrate the violent crackdown. 

These sanctioned entities are the Minsk Special Purpose Police Unit (Minsk OMON), the Main Internal Affairs Directorate of the Minsk City Executive Committee (Minsk GUVD), and KGB Alpha, an elite unit of Belarus’s secret services.