He was nominated by the leading opposition parties in Belarus to run against incumbent Alexander Lukashenko in the 2006 presidential election.

After graduating from the University of Grodno, he defended his Ph.D. thesis at the Institute of Physics of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus.

In 2001 he was the chief of staff of Siamion Domash, one of the opposition leaders running for president in the 2001 presidential elections of Belarus.

[1] In October 2005, at a Congress of Democratic Forces, roughly 900 delegates from various political and civil society groups met in the capital Minsk to pick a single opposition candidate for the 2006 Presidential election.

Milinkievič compared his campaign to that of another pro-Western opposition candidate in neighboring Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, whose victory in late 2004 was dubbed the "Orange Revolution".

Although disappointment in Yushchenko's government culminated in a political crisis in September 2005 amid renewed allegations of mass graft coupled with a worsening economic situation, Milinkievič calls last year's events in Ukraine an inspiration for his supporters.

Earlier, he had already met the new Polish prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, and the president of Lithuania Valdas Adamkus.

[citation needed] On 23 November 2006 government police detained Milinkievič three times as he traveled around Vitebsk Region with a local opposition activist who was accused of causing a fatal hit-and-run accident in the past.