"Some authors attempted to separate the image of Belarus from that of Russia in the eyes and ears of a foreign audience by linguistic means. Vakar had long stated that ‘as a rallying point of the new nationalism, the term “Belorussian” presented certain inconveniences. Semantically, it was too close to Russia’.134 When in English the name of the country used to be transliterated as ‘Belorussia’ the aforementioned inconveniences were all too obvious. While ‘Belarus’ sounds ‘better’ in this regard, it is the adjective ‘Belarusian’ that remains treacherous because in English it sounds nearly identical to ‘Belorussian’. In his 1993 book Zaprudnik attempted to purge the word of the ‘i’; the resulting term ‘Belarusan’ can be traced to Rus’, not by any means
to Russia. However, Zaprudnik’s lead does not seem to have generated much following.13"
http://gioffe.asp.radford.edu/images/pubpdfs/belarusidentity.pdf
Here, by the way, is the quoted paragraph from Nicholas P. Vakar, *Belorussia: The Making of a Nation* (1956) in full (p. 4):
"As a rallying point of the new nationalism, the term Belorussian presented certain inconveniences. Semantically, it was too close to Russia. The early attempts to replace it by the term Kryvičan (from the name of an ancient Slavic tribe on the territory of present Belorussia) failed, but were renewed after the Revolution (Lastoŭski and others), and more recently by political émigrés after World War II (J. Stankevič and others). The use of the term Kryvičan, however, is prohibited in the Belorussian SSR and there is no evidence, at this writing, that it has been widely recognized by the Belorussians abroad."