MINSK, Belarus (AP) – Police stormed the opposition tent camp in the Belarusian capital early Friday and rounded up hundreds of demonstrators who spent a fourth night protesting President Alexander Lukashenko’s victory in a disputed election.

The arrests came after a half-dozen large police trucks and about 100 helmeted riot police with clubs pulled up to October Square in central Minsk about 3 a.m. The police milled about for a few minutes before plowing into the camp.

The United States quickly condemned the police operation, and the European Union said it would expand sanctions against the former Soviet republic and personally punish Lukashenko, who has ruled since 1994.

Belarus ally Russia, however, said the media had distorted the severity of the operation.

Belarus forces first wrestled about 50 resisting demonstrators into the trucks. The rest of the 200-300 demonstrators then filed into the vehicles quietly, seeing that the end had come for the dayslong protest that was unprecedented in the authoritarian ex-Soviet republic.

Journalists were kept about 60 feet away behind police lines, but a local reporter who gave her name only as Olga said she heard a man who was apparently heading the operation yell, “I told you not to beat them!”

The police had long truncheons but were not seen beating demonstrators as they had often done when breaking up smaller opposition rallies in past years. One local journalist said she saw police kick a few demonstrators who fell as they were being hustled into the truck.

By the end of the 15-minute operation, all the protesters had been taken away, leaving only the remains of their encampment _ about 20 backpacker-type tents, blankets, refuse and several of the red-and-white flags they had been waving to signify freedom. City workers with dump trucks and bulldozers quickly cleared the debris.

The dismantling of the camp left in doubt the prospects for opposition forces who had rallied behind presidential candidate Alexander Milinkevich. He has called for a new vote without the participation of the iron-fisted Lukashenko, whose election he contends was unconstitutional because he was allowed to run for a third term after an allegedly fraudulent referendum in 2004 abolished term limits.

“The authorities are destroying freedom, truth and justice. There was only enough democracy for three days and this shows the essence of the regime that has been established in Belarus,” Milinkevich told The Associated Press on Friday.

“The people on the square were courageous. They got up off their knees and together with them all of Belarus stood up.”

The United States, a persistently harsh critic of Lukashenko, was quick to denounce the raid.

“As we have said before, we condemn all acts by the government of Belarus to deprive the citizens of that country of their right to peacefully express their views,” U.S. State Department spokeswoman Janelle Hironimus said in Washington.

On Thursday, Belarus lashed out at repeated U.S. criticism of the elections.

“The people of Belarus have made their choice and it’s absolutely irrelevant here whether the United States likes this choice or not,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Popov said.

Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik said the 25 EU leaders decided to impose restrictions against those responsible for the raid, including Lukashenko.

The EU decision puts Lukashenko on the same blacklist as Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and Burma’s military leaders, all of whom have a freeze on their European assets and visa bans against them.

In Moscow, Russia’s foreign minister said there was no reason to doubt the election results, and he took issue with the media description of police storming the tent camp.

“I would not call the scenes I saw on TV today the use of force,” Sergey Lavrov was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

Opposition youth movement member Nikolai Ilyin, 21, said the demonstrators _ many of them only wearing socks because they had been sleeping _ were taken to a Minsk jail.

“Many people were made to stand in stockinged feet in the snow for two hours. We were made to stand against a wall with our hands up, and those who would turn their heads or say something were punched in their kidneys,” Ilyin said.

He said he fainted and was hospitalized, and then fled.

Released from jail when his father came to get him, Alexander Ushko said police in the trucks “beat those who were the most active and those who were resisting, but beat them in such as way as to avoid leaving traces.”

“They punched me in the legs and the back of the head,” said Ushko, a teenager in his last year of high school.

The protests began with a rally of more than 10,000 people on Sunday, the day of the election. About 5,000 attended a second protest Monday, when a core group decided to make the protests around-the-clock.

Police had been detaining opposition supporters and keeping would-be protesters away from the square. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe tallied more than 200 arrests in the first three days of the protest.

But a top police official said earlier in the week there was no intention to disperse the demonstration.

It was not immediately clear what prompted the pre-dawn raid Friday. An annual television awards ceremony is to be held Friday evening at the Palace of the Republic bordering the square, and the scruffy camp would have been an embarrassment to the government.

Lukashenko supporters, who credit the former collective farm director with providing economic and political stability, were happy to see the tent camp gone.

“They had no business being there; it was a stupid rally,” said Natalia, 57, a pensioner who declined to give her last name for fear of attracting attention. “We live OK and if it something’s not broken, don’t fix it.”

Milinkevich had said he would announce “long-term plans” at what was meant to be a major demonstration Saturday, the anniversary of Belarus’ first independence declaration in 1918 and a traditional rallying day for the opposition.

He told the AP he would continue to call for the rally.