I don't know if anyone has mentioned one potential reason: Opera is the only browser which is clearly not made in the USA. For countries which aren't big fans of the US, this could have made quite a difference.
And you're wrong if you think that Belarus people transfer Lukashenko opinions about USA on software/hardware.
Disclosure:
I am Russian, we opened a filial in Minsk this year.
Belarus have a lot of skilled programmers.
Not code monkeys, a lot of them high qualified, very opinionated.
A lot of them have experience in international firms.
I suppose you've heard about World of Tanks.
The same goes for Kiev/Ukraine programmers, although I did not have experience with them.
It might be interesting to see what happens in Russia with the recently released Yandex browser. After 3 weeks it had 1.8% market share, according to Wikipedia.
