By Mark Trevelyan
(Reuters) -Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko was on track to extend his 31-year rule with a massive win in a presidential election on Sunday that Western governments rejected as a sham.
An exit poll broadcast on state TV projected that Lukashenko would take nearly 88% of the vote. The close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin had earlier defended his jailing of dissidents and declared: "I don't give a damn about the West."
European politicians said the vote was neither free nor fair because independent media are banned in the former Soviet state and all leading opposition figures have been sent to penal colonies or forced to flee abroad.
"The people of Belarus had no choice. It is a bitter day for all those who long for freedom & democracy," German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock posted on X.
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski expressed mock surprise that "only" 87.6% of the electorate appeared to have backed Lukashenko.
"Will the rest fit inside the prisons?" he wrote on X.
Asked about the jailing of his opponents, Lukashenko said they had "chosen" their fate.
"Some chose prison, some chose 'exile', as you say. We didn't kick anyone out of the country," he told a rambling press conference lasting more than four hours and 20 minutes.
He said no one was prevented from speaking out in Belarus, but prison was "for people who opened their mouths too wide, to put it bluntly, those who broke the law".
Officials said turnout was 85.7% in the election, in which 6.9 million people were eligible to vote.
Exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya told Reuters this week that Lukashenko was engineering his re-election as part of a "ritual for dictators". Demonstrations against him took place on Sunday in Warsaw and other East European cities.
Lukashenko shrugged off the criticism as meaningless and said he did not care whether the West recognised the election.
PUTIN ALLY
The EU and the US both said they did not acknowledge him as legitimate leader of Belarus after he used his security forces to crush mass protests following the last election in 2020, when Western governments backed Tsikhanouskaya's claim that he had rigged the count and cheated her of victory.
Tens of thousands of people were arrested in protests against the official result that year, which gave him just over 80% of the vote. Human rights group Viasna, which is banned as an "extremist" organisation, says there are still some 1,250 political prisoners.
Lukashenko has freed more than 250 in the past year on what he called humanitarian grounds, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Sunday that Belarus had "just unilaterally released an innocent American", whom he named as Anastassia Nuhfer.
He gave no further details about the case, which had not previously been made public.
Lukashenko, who did not refer to the release of the American, denied that his pardons of people convicted for "extremist" activity were meant as a bid to repair relations with the West.
He said Belarus was willing to talk to the European Union, but not to "bow before you or crawl on our knees".
Lukashenko faced no serious challenge from the four other candidates on the ballot. While the outcome was never in doubt, he faces difficult choices in his next term as he navigates relations with Russia and the West - the constant theme of his long rule - against the background of possible talks to end the conflict in Ukraine.
The war has bound him more tightly than ever to Putin, with Lukashenko offering his country as a launchpad for the 2022 invasion and later agreeing to let Moscow place tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.
If the conflict ends, political analysts say he is likely to seek to restore his legitimacy with the West in order to ease his isolation and seek the lifting of sanctions.
Lukashenko said he saw "light at the end of the tunnel" as Moscow and Kyiv prepare for possible talks in which he said they would have to thrash out a compromise. He had no regrets, he said, about supporting Putin in the war.