"Lukashenka is the state. For many people a vote against Lukashenka is a vote against the state," said Hrushevoi, also head of the Belarusian charitable fund For the Children of Chernobyl, as he tried to confront the truth that most people in Belarus - the Baltic states' much overlooked neighbor - see no alternative to Lukashenka.
According to official results announced just hours after polls closed, Lukashenka won 75.62 percent of all votes cast, beating two rivals, Hancharyk, with 15.39 percent, and Syarhey Haydukevich, of the extreme right-wing Liberal Democratic Party, with 2.5 percent.
Support for Lukashenka is not evenly distributed around the country. In Minsk he managed only 58 percent against Hancharyk's 30 percent. In Homel, a region deprived of both cash and unbiased information from the country's state-controlled media, he took 87 percent against Hancharyk's 8.5 percent.
Hancharyk, who was virtually unknown to the majority of Belarus' 10 million inhabitants until the opposition united behind him two months ago, is contesting the results. But demonstrations held in the capital Minsk on Sept. 10 were limited to a couple of thousand and a Serbia-style uprising looks unlikely. The mood on Minsk's streets is one of either resignation or disinterest.
Most Belarusians back their president. "We didn't expect anything else," Hanspeter Kleiner, a senior official of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, was overheard saying as the results came in.
The OSCE conducted a limited observation of the election due to delays in receiving invitations from the Belarusian authorities and because two of its officials were denied visas.
In a strongly worded statement the OSCE said: "There were fundamental flaws in the election process. The political regime did everything in its power to block the opposition. The legal framework prevented free and fair elections."
Latvia and Lithuania, which both share eastern borders with Belarus, are likely to take their lead in reacting to the election from the European Union. But such a lead may be some time coming. The EU is likely to wait to say whether it recognizes Lukashenka's claim to the presidency until the OSCE has given its final verdict. This depends on reports from several thousand mostly domestically recruited observers, whose task was to visit the 6,700 polling stations around the country.
The Baltic states have attempted to maintain calm relations with this wayward neighbor, while at the same time keeping their sights on such policy goals as membership of NATO, an organization Lukashenka abhors.
Romanas Algimantas Sedlickas, a Liberal Union MP in Lithuania and member of the parliamentary legal affairs committee, was one of several Baltic politicians who acted as OSCE observers. "On the surface it was well-run, the way it should be," he said. "But there were no equals in the media. The picture painted by the media was like in the good old days - Lukashenka building churches with the head of the Orthodox Church, Lukashenka as head of the military, Lukashenka building dams. It was absolutely obvious that everything was orchestrated from top to bottom."
The OSCE found that in the three weeks prior to election day 68 percent of election coverage in the state-run media was devoted to Lukashenka, all of it either positive or neutral. Hancharyk got 20 percent, of which 60 percent was negative.
Of the three Russian TV stations beamed into Belarus, NTV gave the most balanced coverage, but Kremlin-friendly ORT and RTR gave overwhelmingly positive or neutral coverage of Lukashenka.
"In the villages and towns, ORT and Belarusian Television are the only channels watched," said journalist Alex Znatkevich. "Most radios are wired just for one station, and all FM radio stations are censored."
Allegations made this year that Lukashenka authorized a death squad to murder around 30 people who crossed his path have barely surfaced in the state-run media.
More reliable, smaller circulation independent newspapers are harassed regularly. A printing house used by several of them was closed for several days three weeks ago. An "acting director" put in charge of the presses stopped the publication of a special election issue of the weekly Rabochy, and censored a pre-election article in the Narodnaya Volya daily on Sept. 8, leaving blank spaces on the front page.
The complicity of the Russian media is not surprising. "Russian delegations to the elections were clearly instructed beforehand not to criticize the results," said Sedlickas. "Russia has its own interests. It doesn't want a democrat in Belarus toying with the idea of joining NATO."
The political opposition to Lukashenka's regime, across a spectrum of parties ranging from the nationalist Popular Front to the Belarusian Communist Party, succeeded in uniting around a single candidate, Hancharyk, on 18 Aug. The key idea now is to keep this unprecedented level of cooperation from disintegrating.
"The main person who united the opposition was Lukashenka," said Znatkevich. "But Hancharyk, a trade union leader, was the most acceptable candidate for the left."
But the opposition united too late. It needed a door-to-door campaign and some TV training for the retiring, rather wooden Hancharyk, who is not as sexy for many voters as Lukashenka, an earthy former collective farmer who uses an informal language they can relate to.
The day after the elections, the president was back at work, slamming the OSCE, NATO and the United States in media broadcasts. Hrushevoi switched off the TV and slumped back in his chair, disconsolate. "My greatest fear now is that a new paragraph in the constitution will appear, like the one in 1998 that extended his term in office until 2001. Only this one will extend it eternally."
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