Protesters hold placards criticising Russian support as they march on president’s Minsk residence

Attempts by Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, to crush popular protests against him failed on Sunday when more than 100,000 people marched on his residence in the capital, Minsk, with other demonstrations across the country.

There was no sign that the anti-Lukashenko movement is declining or fading away. Instead protesters took to the streets in huge numbers for the fifth weekend in a row, defying riot police who blocked off the city centre with military vehicles.

Calls grow for Lukashenko to step down as president promises tough response

Tens of thousands of protesters in Belarus have defied threats of a government crackdown to march through central Minsk, again voicing demands that the country’s authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, should step down.

After two Sundays in which the opposition had called huge rallies in Minsk and been left largely unmolested by riot police, this week the president had promised protests would be met with a tough response.

Alexander Lukashenko tells the Kremlin that unrest could spread to Moscow next if his regime is destabilised

The embattled Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, has called on Vladimir Putin to help him quell the growing wave of protest inside the country, which has left his legitimacy in tatters and his regime facing its biggest crisis since he first came to power 26 years ago.

Lukashenko appealed to the Russian president’s visceral fear of revolution at home and suggested that if his regime fell, Putin too was in danger. “This is a threat not just to Belarus … if Belarusians do not hold out, the wave will head over there too,” he said in televised remarks to a meeting of advisers on Saturday, claiming that the protests were organised by shadowy figures from abroad.

Pressure mounts on Alexander Lukashenko to go as protests threaten to spill beyond Belarus’s borders

• Women in Belarus take protests into their own hands
• ‘It’s like a war’: armed men roam streets of Minsk

The Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, have expressed confidence that all problems that had arisen in Belarus would soon be resolved, the Kremlin said.

“These problems should not be exploited by destructive forces seeking to harm the mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries within the framework of the union state,” the Kremlin said in a statement on Saturday.