Belarus

Belarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe bordered by Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, with Minsk as its capital and largest city, administered with special status separate from the country's six other regions. For centuries Belarusian lands were ruled by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and then, for roughly 500 years, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, before the partitions of Poland between 1792 and 1795 placed the territory within the Russian Empire; after the 1917 Russian Revolution and ensuing civil war, the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic became a founding constituent republic of the Soviet Union in 1922, and the country lost about a quarter of its prewar population, roughly 2.2 million people, along with 85 percent of its industrial base, during the Second World War. Belarus declared independence on 25 August 1991 during the Soviet Union's dissolution, with international recognition following on 26 December 1991 and its current constitution adopted on 15 March 1994. It operates as a unitary semi-presidential republic under an authoritarian dictatorship, and Alexander Lukashenko has served as president since 1994; with a population of about 9.1 million, Belarus ranks low in international measures of press freedom and civil liberties and is one of only three European countries that still retains capital punishment.