Web-site: http://www.president.gov.by/en/

Alexander Lukashenko (Александр Григорьевич Лукашенко) was born on Aug. 31, 1954, in Kopys, Belarus.

Education: Mogilev Pedagogical Institute, 1975. Economics and agricultural management, Belarussian Agricultural Academy, 1985.

1975-1977: Served in the Border Guard

1975-1978: Worked in the Komsomol

1980-1982: Officer of the 120th Motorized Rifle Guard Division of the Soviet Army

1979-1991: Member of the Communist Party

1982-1985: Deputy chairman of collective farm

1985: Secretary of the Shklov regional Kolkhoz Committee

1987-1994: Director of the Gorodets cooperative farm in the Shklov region

1990: Elected to the Belarussian Supreme Soviet (12th Congress) as a deputy from Shklov. He was the only deputy to vote against the December 1991 agreement that dissolved the Soviet Union and established the CIS.

1993: Chairman of the Anti-Corruption Committee of the Belarussian parliament. He accused then-Speaker of Parliament Stanislav Shushkevich and other senior officials of corruption. Shushkevich lost a subsequent vote of confidence and resigned.

1994: Elected president of Belarus with 45.1 percent of the vote (re-elected in 2001, 2006 and 2010 amid reports of vote-rigging)

In his nearly two decades in power, Lukashenko has quashed the political opposition and maintained many elements of the Soviet planned economy. The United States has called his government “the last dictatorship in Europe."

Lukashenko is married to Galina Rodionovna — who has never appeared with him in public — and has three sons. His third son, Nikolai, was born out of wedlock to his personal nurse, Irina Abelskaya, in 2004.