* As of 6/9/2025
1 birth
Every 8.4 minutes
1 death
Every 4.4 minutes
1 emigrant
Every 3.0 hours
1 person
Every 8.8 minutes
Belarus, a Eurasian landlocked country bordered by Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Ethnic Belarusians constitute approximately 84% of the total population of Belarus. Russians are the next largest ethnic group at 8% of the population, followed by Poles (3%) and Ukrainians (1.5%). While Russian is the official and main language of the country, Belarusian is also widely spoken. Yiddish, Polish, and Ukrainian are also spoken.
59% of the population claims Eastern Orthodox Christianity as their faith; Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are practiced among some of the percentage of residents. Judaism and Baha’i faiths are also practiced by about 4% of the Belarus population. Belarus has no official religion, but under its constitution it allows for freedom of worship and religious practice as long as they pose no harm to social or governmental institutions.
Recent economic growth in the area has largely been fueled by foreign investment in recent years. The success of the economy in Belarus is also closely tied with economic success in Russia because of their long term ties with the area. The government has a heavy hand in most all economic divisions and it is very difficult for small businesses to flourish. Major industries in Belarus include energy (renewable energy, oil, natural gas, oil shale, and electricity), automobile manufacturing, iron, and metal ore mining, defense, banking, agriculture, technology, and tourism.
The President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has been in power since 1994 and has given the country one of the worst human rights records in Europe with rigged elections giving the people of the country little control. Monopolies run the major business sectors in Belarus, and even though they are no longer a republic of Russia, the Russian government still very much exerts its influence over the area.
Belarus is a former republic of the Soviet Union, but has been an independent nation since 1991 after the downfall of Russia, and applying for EU membership in 2009, which risked severing political ties with Russia- whom they have been historically dependent upon for energy. Belarus had the largest refugee population in Europe just twenty years ago, accounting for 7.5% of its population. 300,000 people left the country in the 90’s, one-fifth of which had a higher education.
