GenZedong

I would recommend three works to quickly get up to speed on Belarus and to dispel a lot of Western propaganda:

1. The Last Soviet Republic, by Stewart Parker (short book)
2. Market Socialism in Belarus: An Alternative to China's Socialist Market Economy, by Cheng Enfu (academic study from the head of China's Academy of Social Sciences)
3. The Moral Economy of Ordinary Belarusians and a Critical Examination and Re-Evaluation of the 2020 Post-Electoral Uprising, by Geoffrey Blank (academic study from an American who lived in Belarus for a few years and spent some time interrogating citizens as to their political views)

Worth noting is that despite not (openly) identifying as a Communist anymore Lukashenko still governs in coalition with the Belarusian Communists, Belarusian Communists take up key posts in the state administration, and most of the Belarusian economy remains state-owned/run and inequality is kept low, unlike in neighboring Russia.

The Belarusian-Russian relationship is also highly complex and cannot be boiled down to the typical western narratives but that's outside the scope of this discussion; suffice to say that the narratives being pushed nowadays by the West (Lukashenko is Putin's lapdog, Belarus is a colony of Russia, etc.) are being pushed by certain factions which have an interest in obscuring what's really happening and blocking actual analysis of the differences between the two countries.