“Why are there no Belarusian food trucks at this festival?” an attendee asked her, his voice tinged with frustration. Tsikhanouskaya had been thrust into a global spotlight after she ran for president in place of her husband — who was jailed by the Belarusian regime in May 2020. She paused before answering: It was possible to talk to the organizers.

Three years after a brutal crackdown on peaceful protests in Belarus sent a new round of exiles into neighboring countries with a wellspring of energy for changing the regime, the mood at the festival was subdued. Dissidents who not long ago were anticipating another revolution had reevaluated the situation: Nothing major could be done for now. 

Hope for political change had run aground against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and, not coincidentally, a worsening climate of repression inside Belarus. Russia’s grip on the government of “Europe’s last dictator,” Alexander Lukashenko, has only tightened, with Moscow using Belarus as a staging ground for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Days before the festival in Poland, Wagner fighters had crossed into Belarus, invited by Lukashenko after their failed armed rebellion in Russia, a move that brought the Belarusian leader even closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Tutaka Festival was billed as the “festival of the awakened.” It had two aims: to celebrate Belarusian culture and to give Belarusian dissidents scattered across Eastern Europe an opportunity to meet up. Belarusian rock bands were the headline acts, but time was also given to panels on showing solidarity with the 1,513 political prisoners in Belarus and on renewing political activism. At the festival’s opening ceremony, an announcer observed that they were so close to the Belarusian border “that even the mosquitos were from home.”

Tsikhanouskaya had traveled to Poland from her base in Vilnius, the capital of neighboring Lithuania, to update exiles on her work. Since her forced departure from Belarus in August 2020, she has hosted informal Q&As on open video calls. Among the few hundred people who attended the festival on its opening day, around 50 huddled around to hear her speak. Following the first question, about the food trucks, another attendee asked if Tsikhanouskaya had visited art galleries on her diplomatic trips around the world. One person asked, as a joke, if she had a doppelganger, while someone else wondered if sanctions placed on Belarus should be eased in return for the release of political prisoners. There were no questions about when Tsikhanouskaya thought she might return home. 

A 38-year-old festival goer who was attending with friends after two years of exile said he no longer felt optimistic at all. “I don’t see real power in them,” he told me, referring to the opposition movement as a whole. “They do a lot to support our paperwork, but I don’t see how they can change the situation in Belarus. The Belarusian regime has become too strong.”

When Lukashenko claimed victory in the August 2020 election, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in protest. Although it was not the first time that Belarusians had come out to protest election outcomes, 2020 was different. This time, many more citizens had mobilized. Factory workers went on strike, with some even heckling Lukashenko, calling for him to “go away.” The protests rippled out from Minsk, the capital, to smaller cities such as Gomel. Members of Lukashenko’s security forces left to join the protesters. Even after Tsikhanouskaya left the country, the protests continued without her. By the fall of 2020, it looked like Lukasheko’s time in office could be up. But it wasn’t to be. With the help of Russia, which promised military support, the old guard hung on.

It wasn’t long before the security services responded with excessive force. According to Human Rights Watch, almost 7,000 people were detained and held under inhumane conditions. At least two protestors were killed. Thousands fled the country fearing arrest or imprisonment. The repression of democratic voices in Belarus continued long after people were forced to leave the streets. 

Lukashenko, who has been president since 1994, responded to the protests by further unraveling the country’s constitution and centralizing even more power around himself — in what political scientists call a personalized dictatorship. In a move to ensure no one ever challenged his power again, Lukashenko had Belarusians arrested for sharing pro-democracy Facebook posts or even wearing white and red, the colors of the flag that came to symbolize the 2020 protest movement. Sanctions from the EU and the U.S. did not deter the regime. Instead, it leaned more and more on Russia for economic support. 

Dissidents and exiles looked on with mounting consternation as these events unfolded. Tsikhanouskaya initially encouraged people back home to publicly protest. But as the repressions grew, and as Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine, she began to tell them to wait for the right moment to trigger the next revolution. A few Belarusians ignored her calls and formed a group known as the “Rail Partisans” to disrupt Russian military supply lines in southern Belarus near the border with Ukraine. Members of the group were arrested and later sentenced to over 20 years in prison. 

The heady days of 2020 began to fade, and exiled Belarusians questioned the optimism that had once sustained them. Tsikhanouskaya was increasingly viewed as more of a celebrity symbol rather than a viable presidential successor. Challengers to her status, such as the former Culture Minister Pavel Latushko, set up their own organizations. Other figures, such as Valery Tsepkalo, another 2020 presidential candidate who initially fled to Moscow, became outwardly hostile, accusing members of the exiled opposition of financial mismanagement. All of this signaled to dissidents that key players in the exiled opposition were focused on self-aggrandizement and petty politics rather than the democratic struggle.

I learned about the Tutaka Festival from Anatoli, a 35-year-old dissident who fled Belarus two years ago after he was prosecuted on trumped-up charges for participating in the 2020 protests. (Anatoli asked that only his first name be used for the safety of family members who are still in Belarus.) He had grown up in the eastern Gomel region dreaming of a world beyond Belarus’ borders. His family’s resistance to Lukashenko in the mid 2000s had resulted in his expulsion from a local sports team and tarnished his future prospects. Having learned English, he managed to move to the U.S. as a student in 2009. He lived in Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and California, working in IT and running profitable side hustles. But after a motorcycle accident, he returned home in 2017.

Anatoli felt he had come back to a country he could live in. Although Belarus still relied heavily on Russia for bilateral trade and loans to the tune of billions of dollars, Lukashenko had started to improve relations with the European Union. The Belarusian government didn’t pretend to share the EU’s democratic values, but it saw an opportunity to diversify trade away from Russia. In order to keep the door with the EU open, Lukashenko allowed some democracy-promoting organizations to set up shop.

There is an unwritten rule common to many authoritarian regimes: As long as you didn’t engage in serious opposition politics, the government largely left you alone. Anatoli continued to work in IT and began an import-export business. He built friendships and volunteered when the Covid-19 pandemic hit (while Lukashenko prescribed driving tractors and drinking vodka as a cure). But the 2020 election changed Anatoli’s tolerance quotient. “I had to get involved,” he told me when we met in Vilnius on a recent summer afternoon.

Shortly after taking to the streets in August 2020, he was arrested and thrown into Minsk’s notorious Okrestina jail for three days, where he was kept in a 215-square-foot cell with 80 other people. Upon his release, he went back onto the streets and attended protests most Sundays.

Anatoli was enamored by the unity shown by Belarusians. “I had faith when I went to the protests, I believed that something could change,” he told me. But he was targeted by security forces again and, in mid-2021, he left the country. 

From the relative safety of Lithuania, Anatoli looked around at the world of the exiled opposition. What he saw were fractured and bickering groups, a situation he likened to Ivan Krylov’s fable “Swan, Pike and Crawfish,” a tale of three animals who failed to carry a loaded cart because they were each spinning “backwards,” “skywards” and “towards the sea.” Everyone wanted to do the right thing, but they were consumed by infighting and one-upmanship. It was frustrating, Anatoli said, to see the energy that swirled around Minsk in August 2020 being weakened in export.

Also in Lithuania, Tsikhanouskaya was setting up her office. From the outset, her young team sought diplomatic and financial support from the U.S. and the E.U. and took meetings with high-level politicians, such as the former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel. When Lukashenko ordered the grounding of a Ryanair flight traveling through Belarusian airspace that was carrying Roman Protasevich, a dissident who helped to steer the 2020 protests, Tsikhanouskaya’s office kept up the pressure for Western sanctions. Protasevich later became a Lukashenko spokesperson, after trading his freedom for a change in his public position on the regime. But there were also rumblings from exiles, like Anatoli, suspicious that members of Tsikhanouskaya’s team were ultimately concerned with future-proofing their own careers.

A conversation with exiles about Tsikhanouskaya will almost always turn to Franak Viacorka, the 35-year-old spearheading her team’s agenda. Known for his intellect and for being a demanding boss, Viacorka has been referred to as the democratic movement’s gray cardinal, the shadow power in the office. It’s a characterization he rejects. He sees himself instead as the “toxic handler,” a term he came across when reading up on business management: a person who deals with toxicity, frustration and apathy. Viacorka is a smooth communicator — having frequently engaged with the international press over the past three years and worked as a journalist himself — and he speaks in neat, quotable sentences.

Viacorka told me there was more support for Tsikhanouskaya than two years ago but recognized that there was also frustration. “What people don’t understand is that Sviatlana and the office is only as strong as the people around her, as strong as the movement,” he said. He also told me that Tsikhanouskaya fights sexist headwinds, the idea “that a woman cannot be successful on her own accord.” 

We first met at the Tutaka Festival where he had camped with a group of friends and colleagues. In Vilnius, where we sat down to talk, Viacorka was in full work mode, getting ready for an event to commemorate the anniversary of the 2020 protests. He had been with Tsikhanouskaya’s office almost from the beginning, when he fled Minsk for Kyiv and then turned his attention to Vilnius to help Tsikhanouskaya establish herself in exile. Since then, Viacorka has “connected the dots,” helping his boss understand the history of Belarus’ opposition and chart the path forward. But to many on the outside, he seems opportunistic. In Anatoli’s eyes, “he’s been raised as a politician” and should be treated with caution. Viacorka told me he harbors no political ambitions.

There is a dizzying array of organizations vying for attention in administering the Belarusian opposition in exile. They include Tsikhanouskaya’s office, the Coordination Council, the United Transitional Cabinet and the National Anti-Crisis Management organization. To Anatoli, it seemed all these groups were too busy vying for power among themselves rather than bringing about genuine change to their country.

So, instead of becoming involved with any of them, he began to help out with grassroot organizations that centered around sport. He was convinced that a revolution in Belarus was not possible while the country was still traumatized by the events of 2020. With emboldened security services, he told me, people wouldn’t risk taking to the streets unless a monumental event took place. “The person who will actually change things will be an outsider,” he said. “Look at Zelenskyy, he worked under the radar for years.”

Since early 2022, Anatoli and his friends have turned their attention to helping Ukraine in whatever way they can. They organized aid and medical supplies for both the Belarusians and Ukrainians who were fighting on the frontline and for refugees. When the invasion began, hundreds of Belarusians rushed to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian army. Their hope was that a Ukrainian victory would also herald the end of Lukashenko’s rule, but as the war dragged on, the number of Belarusian volunteers is reported to have declined.

In fact, the exiled opposition’s relationship with the Ukrainian government has been strained since the early days of the war. The Ukrainian government has been slow to oppose Lukashenko, who has not formally joined the war. Lithuania’s former foreign minister, Linas Linkevicius, told me that Tsikhanouskaya’s early position on Russia had cast doubt in the mind of Ukraine’s leaders. “Tsikhanouskaya still had the hope of talking to Moscow during the 2020 protests and that is something that hasn’t played well with Kyiv,” he told me. 

In February, Zelenskyy’s advisor Mikhail Podolyak gave a damning critique of the Belarusian opposition, telling Lithuanian media that Ukraine does “not see any reason to develop these relations, because we do not see a clear anti-war activity on the part of the opposition.” When asked about a formal meeting between Zelenskyy and Tsikhanouskaya, Podolyak said that the Ukrainian president did not see value in it.

But since the invasion, Tsikhanouskaya has been fervently anti-Russia, arguing that only a victorious Ukraine can bring a new dawn to Belarus. When I met Tsikhanouskaya briefly on the sidelines of the Tutaka Festival, I asked her about her relationship with Zelenskyy. Before answering, she took a long pause, her deep brown eyes scanning for the right words. The relationship was changing, she said: “At the beginning, they didn’t even want to communicate with us because they didn’t want to irritate Lukashenko. But now, it’s evident that Lukashenko is on the side of the Kremlin.”

I asked her about the exiles and dissidents and their allegations of ineffectiveness leveled against her team. Tsikhanouskaya said that although momentum has waxed and waned over the course of the last three years, her team was working toward that moment when the Belarusian system is suddenly disrupted and an opportunity for real change emerges. Others in exile must stay the course and not wait for everybody else to do the work, she said. 

Anatoli gave me his response when I told him what Tsikhanouskaya had said. “The longer you’re in exile, the more you need to start thinking about where else you can build your life,” he said.

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Bulchak’s case is not unique. On the day Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine began, another Catholic priest, Father Alexander Baran, posted a photo of the Ukrainian flag and the flag of the Belarusian opposition movement on social media. He was subsequently arrested, charged with “illegal picketing” and the “dissemination of extremist materials” and sentenced to 10 days in prison. Around the same time, Father Andrei Kevlich, another Belarusian Catholic priest, was detained and later fined for reposting content about the war from banned independent media. 

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has tightened the space for the Catholic Church and its priests in Belarus to criticize the government and its authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Although the clampdown on the Church began soon after the rigged presidential election in August 2020, which saw Lukashenko claim 80% of the vote, the Belarusian regime has taken advantage of the attention given to the war in Ukraine to gain an even greater hold over a key religious institution in Belarusian society. 

It has also proved to be an opportunity to end what the Belarusian government believes is a dangerous pocket of Western influence in a country that allows the Russian military to use its territory to wage its war on Ukraine.

For Catholics in Belarus, “the whole atmosphere has become one of fear,” said Natalia Vasilevich, a Belarusian theologian and human rights lawyer based in Germany. “Sermons are being watched, trust is even being tested inside some communities, even the social networks of priests are being checked. People cannot trust any structures anymore. They can only trust the relationships in front of them.”

Historically, the Belarusian Catholic Church has close ties to the Polish Catholic Church, which, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, helped to beef up the numbers of the Belarusian Catholic clergy. By working to sever the ties between these two Churches, Lukashenko believes he has exorcized a malign Western influence hanging over the country’s second-largest religious community.

If the Catholic clergy in Belarus was hoping that the Vatican would advocate for their right to free speech, they have been mistaken. In fact, Vatican diplomacy has seriously weakened the ability of the Catholic Church in Belarus to withstand the slings and arrows of Lukashenko’s government. Instead of defending its priests, the Vatican’s ecclesiastical diplomats have taken a conciliatory tone with the Belarusian regime, ensuring that the Church’s high-level influence is not diminished. It’s a move reminiscent of Ostpolitik, a Cold-War era strategy that saw the Vatican open communication channels with the Communist governments of Eastern and Central Europe.

“The role of the Vatican in Belarus has been to make the Catholic Church less visible as a protesting institution,” said Vasilevich, the Belarusian theologian. The justification for such a move, Vasilevich argues, is that the Vatican has seized an opportunity to become a bridge between Lukashenko and the West while foreign diplomats close their doors in response to Belarus’ alliance with Russia. 

In November 2022, nine months after the first Russian tank rolled across Belarus’ border to invade Ukraine, the Vatican’s ambassador to Belarus gave a speech to celebrate 30 years of relations between the Holy See and Belarus. He stated that the relationship between the two states “continues to be supplemented with new wonderful pages.” His speech came weeks after mass was banned in Minsk’s iconic Catholic Red Church, which was damaged in a mysterious fire that September. Later that year the same Vatican ambassador, Ante Jozic, told Belarusian state TV that Minsk could host peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, a line also parroted by Lukashenko.

To Belarusian Catholics, no other example reflects the Vatican’s coziness with the Belarusian government than the case of Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz. After defending the rights of anti-government protesters in 2020, the widely respected cleric was denied entry to Belarus on his return from a ceremony in Poland. When he was eventually allowed to return to Minsk following an intervention from Pope Francis, Kondrusiewicz was forced to retire and replaced with a Belarusian bishop, Iosif Stanevsky, thought to be more sympathetic to the regime. In November 2022, Stanevsky gave a papal Order of St. Gregory to Alexander Zaitsev, a close ally of Lukashenko and businessman subject to EU sanctions. 

“Now there is no illusion among Belarusian Catholics about the Vatican’s stance. However, at the parish priest level, almost all Catholic priests are against the authorities,” said Aliaksei Lastouski, a researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden. The Vatican declined to comment for this article.

In response, Catholic priests in exile from Belarus have mobilized to counter the threats to Catholic priests who remain in the country. Father Viachaslau Barok, an exiled parish priest, sent a letter to Pope Francis that questioned the Vatican ambassador’s relationship with the Belarusian government and pleaded with the pontiff not to be swayed by the regime. “Everyone can see that by calling you ‘the best Pope,’ Lukashenko only seeks to hide behind the authority of St. Peter’s successor,” he wrote. 

It’s not only the Vatican. The Belarusian Orthodox Church, the largest religious denomination in the country, has also sought to placate the regime. After the 2020 presidential election, the leaders of the Orthodox Church were reported to have removed senior members known to be critical of Lukashenko. Since the full scale Ukraine invasion, it has transferred priests as punishment after they showed opposition to the war. This alliance between the Belarusian Orthodox Church and the state was on display when Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, visited Minsk last June to celebrate the 1,030th anniversary of Orthodoxy in Belarus, a visit that highlighted Moscow’s willingness to drag Belarus, a nation widely regarded as one of the most secular former Soviet states, into its religious sphere of influence. 

All the while Belarus’ Catholics are becoming less engaged with the Vatican and more frightened of their precarious position in the country. “The Vatican is no longer a pillar that you know will always be on your side,” said Vasilevich.

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But people from countries such as Iraq and Cameroon who are trying to come across another border with Poland have received a starkly different response. Further north along the EU member state’s border with Belarus, their pleas for help are being ignored. 

Initially angered by EU sanctions following Belarus’s rigged presidential election in August 2020, strongman leader Alexander Lukashenko lured people from around the world to his country on the false promise that they can get easy access to a safer future in western Europe. Hoping that an increase in asylum seekers will sow discord across the EU, Belarusian authorities have ferried men, women and children to the border with Poland and forced them to cross since mid-2021.

Poland’s response has been heavy-handed. As the number of attempted crossings swelled last fall, human rights groups documented unlawful cases of pushbacks by Polish border guards, a practice that continues to this day. The border area was also militarized, and an exclusion zone established.

European Union leaders in Brussels have been positive on Poland’s actions, as the issue of how to respond to migration is largely considered the business of individual member states. When Warsaw announced in January that it had started construction on a metal wall along the Belarusian border to keep people out, European allies issued no objections.

Despite the 18-foot-high and 116-mile-long barrier, people have not been deterred from seeking protection in the EU. But it has worsened conditions for asylum seekers who risk life-threatening injuries and death trying to scale it.

Now with surveillance technology being installed along the wall, and Poland fearful that Russia and Belarus will usher many more people to its borders, Aleksandra Łoboda, a member of the humanitarian organization Grupa Granica, warns against border militarization.

With temperatures falling, we spoke about the current situation on this part of the Polish border. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Aleksandra, what is the situation on the Poland-Belarus border right now?

Since the wall was raised, the Polish government’s narrative is that it has been a deterrent and the scale of the humanitarian crisis has reduced. We follow the situation very closely and we know that’s not true. What the wall has done is diminish the health of people who are trying to cross the border. We have been treating a lot of leg injuries from falls, a lot of cuts from the razor wire that lines the top of the wall. There are more and more cases of hypothermia. The situation is tough.  

We don’t have an estimate on how many people are crossing, but we do know how many people are asking us for help (we only provide humanitarian aid to people who are on the Polish side). So, every week it’s between 100-200 people. Last week, there were 149 requests for assistance. Also, take into consideration we are not the only initiative providing humanitarian aid, so the real number of people is even higher.

Over the last 14 months, 27 people are confirmed to have died on the Polish-Belarus border. We believe around 190 people are missing. We will never know how many people died on the border because so much of the evidence gathering has been left to grass roots organizations.

This month the initial installation phase of high-tech surveillance equipment along the wall was inspected by Polish authorities. How could this infringe on the rights of asylum seekers?

It’s a further attempt to militarize the border. This should not be the response to the humanitarian crisis. No wall can stop migrants crossing the border if they are seeking international protection. 

Building a wall and adding surveillance could contribute to even higher abuse of peoples’ rights, the rights to asylum, right to freedom from torture. If you want to get to the root of migration, you cannot just erect a barrier and hope the issue will disappear. 

When I was reporting near the Poland-Belarus border last year, there was a lot of disinformation swirling around about the people on the Belarus border. Has that continued?

The government is actively spreading disinformation and claiming that people who are crossing the Poland-Belarus border are economic migrants who do not need international protection. We have documented people who have been asking us for help and most of them come from countries affected by war and conflict, so this is one kind of disinformation.

Another is the line that the people who are trying to cross the border with Belarus pose a threat to national security. We have helped approximately 13,500 people from the border area, but the Polish community has accepted hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, and it hasn’t posed a threat to national security. We have seen it is possible for Polish society to accept people from other countries, to accept a larger number of people who are fleeing wars and conflict. So, I think the government has proved that its own line is propaganda, disinformation. 

The EU has supported the Polish government’s actions on the Poland-Belarus border. How do you feel about that?

There is more than one humanitarian crisis on European borders. The EU needs to take a common approach, which should not focus on the militarization of borders but should examine how to implement the right to asylum, the right to international protection. As a bloc it needs to change its current policy in terms of migration. 

Looking ahead, the Polish government says it will build a temporary security wall with Kaliningrad to prevent migrants crossing over from the Russian enclave. How much is this on your radar?

We are closely monitoring the situation on the Poland-Kaliningrad border and for now, as far as I know, there have not been a lot of people trying to cross. We will monitor the situation and see what happens. Judging by the Poland-Belarus border there may be a real threat to peoples’ rights so we must keep an eye on it. 

Aside from migrants, a lot of Polish people don’t want Russians to seek asylum in Europe because of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Our message is that everyone has the same right, anyone who flees persecution from war and conflict can seek protection regardless of their nationality.

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“No one was allowed in because they were afraid that people would take pictures, protest, and block the work,” said Marek Zaniewski, the vice president of the Union of Poles in Belarus, relaying accounts from people who witnessed the operation in the predominantly ethnic-Polish district. 

A Catholic priest was able to get inside the perimeter but was soon ejected, and authorities threatened people who tried to take pictures with prosecution. Later that day however, photos emerged online showing that the cemetery site had been leveled to the ground.

Zaniewski said when he heard the news, his initial shock soon gave way to despair. 

“Surkonty is a very important place for Poles living in Belarus,” he said. “Its destruction was a very painful blow.”

The history of the Home Army is problematic for Belarusian strongman Aleksander Lukashenko and his pro-Russian regime. While the Home Army’s primary enemy during the war had been Nazi Germany, the fighters at Surkonty had been killed by Soviet soldiers in battle in 1944. 

The destruction of the cemetery at Surkonty came one day after Poland demolished a Soviet-era monument. Western media framed the events as tit-for-tat retaliation, but the cemetery destruction wasn’t the first — at least five other Polish military cemeteries had been desecrated this summer.

The destruction of these Polish grave sites is the latest salvo in a broader, accelerating campaign to rewrite the history of World War II and the Holocaust in Belarus which Lukashenko has been waging since his 2020 crackdown on anti-government protestors, leaving him vulnerable domestically and isolated internationally. Lukashenko’s government has been building a new nationalist narrative that marginalizes minorities in Belarus in favor of a homogenous, Soviet-style national identity, and ties the regime’s challengers at home and abroad to the familiar Nazi enemies of the past.

The Lukashenko government’s relationship with Belarus’s Polish, Jewish, and Lithuanian heritage had fluctuated before 2020 — but now, amid the state’s mounting project of historical revisionism, not only have authorities increasingly been working to erase reminders of these peoples’ history in Belarus, but they have also hijacked the history of the Holocaust in Belarus to frame it as part of a genocide not of Jews, but rather ethnic Belarusians.

In this version of history, Belarusian victimhood is central, and Russia’s victory over Nazism during World War II defines the modern Belarusian state and its relationships to its hostile neighbors. On the ground, Lukashenko’s historical policy has translated into persecution of minority communities, the Russification of Belarusian national symbols, and fears of a dangerous new phase in Lukashenko’s ongoing effort to eliminate threats to his rule.

“They’re trying to create this atmosphere of us against the whole world,” said Hanna Liubakova, a Belarusian journalist, describing the government’s motivations. The goal is to arouse an us-versus-them mentality relying on memories of World War II. “There are enemies around us, and they are all trying to exterminate us, and this has happened before. That’s why we have to keep together and support this great leader.”

In January, Lukashenko’s government passed the Law on the Genocide of the Belarusian People, which proclaims that Nazi Germany carried out a genocide against ethnic Belarusians during WWII, defining Belarusian people as “all Soviet citizens who lived on the territory” of Belarus at the time. Anyone who denies any part of this narrative can face jail time. Israeli scholars warn that describing all victims of Nazi war crimes in Belarus, including hundreds of thousands of Jews, as ethnic Belarusians amounts to Holocaust denial.

“There’s no obvious corroboration for the idea that when the Germans came in they were out to get Belarusians,” said David Marples, a historian at the University of Alberta, who specializes in Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian history and has written several books on modern Belarus.

Yet this has not stopped authorities from trying to establish facts on the ground that support their narrative — Belarusian state media has reported that renewed excavations of WWII-era mass graves sites in the country have already begun, with the aim of uncovering “the whole truth” of the purported genocide against Belarusians. 

According to Veranika Laputska, a Holocaust researcher and the co-founder of the EAST Center, a think-tank focused on the post-Soviet space, the Belarusian state has threatened to begin excavating Jewish grave sites as well, including at the Nazi death camp at Maly Trostenets, in order to inflate the number of victims who were killed there for political purposes.

“If they’re going to start re-digging these mass graves, it means that they will not only be distorting the memory of Belarusian Jews but also European Jews who were unfortunately killed on Belarusian territory,” said Laputska.

Lukashenko has set the stage to use the genocide law’s claims to go after his enemies.  In February, Lukashenko formally tasked General Prosecutor Andrei Shved, who had previously called the Polish Home Army “fascist criminals,” with hunting down alleged perpetrators of this genocide who had escaped punishment, calling it “a matter of historical justice.”

Shved’s office published in April a lengthy manuscript to support the genocide law’s conclusions and presents the purported evidence for Hitler’s campaign against Belarusians. It is a skewed, dubiously-sourced, and “amateurish” perspective on Nazi atrocities in Belarus, according to Marples, the historian, that undermines the realities of the Holocaust, and also implicates the Polish Home Army, Lithuanian forces, Latvian paramilitaries, and others as active parties to genocide alongside the Germans. The document also takes aim at the 2020 anti-government protestors, falsely claiming they wore Nazi insignia.  

This might point to the government’s intentions to launch a future “denazification’ campaign,” said Laputska of the EAST Center, labeling neighboring states as Nazis and fomenting national opinion against countries like Poland and Lithuania. “And then, we don’t know what is going to happen.”

The recent grave destructions may indicate this leap has already taken place, said Denis Kazakiewicz, a journalist and analyst based in Brussels who is from the Polish-Belarusian community.

Vladimir Putin has frequently described Ukraine’s government and people as fascists or Nazis to justify his invasion of the country. “If you think that those people” — the Home Army —  “are Nazis, and the people who come to their graves are Nazis, that means that the state that supports those people are also Nazis,” said Kazakiewicz. “That means that the Russian and Belarusian state has the moral grounds to attack those Nazis as they do now in Ukraine.”

Lukashenko’s most recent hostility toward Poland and Lithuania stems from their support of the 2020 protests against his rule. After the presidential election, that year was deemed fraudulent by the international community, Lukashenko declared himself the victor and violently ended the protests. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the candidate who ran against Lukashenko in the presidential election, fled to Lithuania later that year. Poland, especially, has been demonized by Lukashenko as a bellicose, anti-Belarusian aggressor acting at the behest of the United States.

At least 288,000 ethnic Poles, around 19,000 Lithuanians, and nearly 13,000 Jews continue to live in Belarus, and Poles especially have increasingly become regarded by the state as a fifth column loyal to the West. In 2021, several prominent leaders of the Union of Poles in Belarus were put behind bars, including journalist Andrzej Poczobut and activist Andżelika Borys, on charges of “inciting national and religious hatred” and “rehabilitation of Nazism,” according to the Prosecutor General’s Office. They joined tens of thousands of Belarusian protestors who were arrested during and after the 2020 demonstrations.

While using history to vilify his enemies, Lukashenko is building an ideological bridge connecting Belarusian and Russian heritage. Lukashenko anointed the day the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939 a national holiday this year. 

As Belarus has moved closer to Russia, Moscow has helped Lukashenko use history to pursue his political goals. In April, Shved and his Russian counterpart created a joint working group to “establish the circumstances” of the genocide of “the Soviet people.” Earlier this year, Lukashenko not only agreed to let Russia launch attacks on Ukraine from Belarusian territory, but also to host Russian troops and nuclear warheads indefinitely. 

Uladzimir Vialichkin, the head of the local branch of the human rights organization Viasna in the western Belarusian city of Brest who fled the country in 2021, said Belarusian authorities have been chipping away at vestiges of Brest’s Jewish and Polish heritage for years, and although efforts have been made by foreign organizations to preserve evidence of Jewish cemeteries and document desecrated Jewish gravestones in the city, amateur guides who’ve drawn attention to this history have been harassed by authorities.

“The goal of this is singular,” Vialichkin said. “That this is Russian territory, a Russian city, Russian everything.”

In Surkonty, ethnic Poles have erected wooden crosses on the site of the military cemetery several days after it was desecrated. According to Zaniewski of the Union of Poles in Belarus, even these were removed by authorities, and in September another Polish grave was reportedly found destroyed. 

“Destroying a cemetery doesn’t destroy the memory of people,” Zaniewski said. “Those crosses will rise again.”

But as Vialichkin witnesses more graves getting desecrated, memorial inscriptions being altered, and more of the country’s history shifting before his eyes with each passing year, he has doubts.

“The witnesses of these crimes naturally die off, and now there’s no one left to challenge this,” Vialichkin said.

“History is being rewritten. Everything is being rewritten.”

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For Lithuanians, their country’s medieval history has been a source of pride, pageantry and identity. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic, multilingual state that sprawled across swathes of the Baltics and eastern Europe, including modern-day Lithuania, Belarus, and parts of Poland, Latvia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia. 

Its heyday, historians agree, was in the late 14th century and through much of the 15th century before the Union of Lublin in 1569 formalized a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. 

Small as Lithuania is, compared to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, it considers itself, and has broadly been considered to be the keeper of the Grand Duchy’s historical legacy. Lithuania’s coat of arms and its euro coins feature its iconic knight mounted, sword aloft, on a charging warhorse.

The Lithuanian journalist Vaidas Saldžiūnas remembers going into a souvenir shop on a trip to neighboring Belarus and seeing what looked like a Lithuanian mounted knight emblazoned across stationery, mugs and wallets. He was surprised that he felt a little indignant, as if a part of his country’s history had been appropriated.

“It’s like someone is studying the layout of your home,” says Saldžiūnas about his own response in the souvenir shop, “and nonchalantly saying, ‘here, that’s my bed, that’s my restroom, and this is where I cook.’” In other words, it was as if the Belarusians were squatting in a house long owned by Lithuanians.

He was not alone. 

In 2013, Lithuania’s Ministry of National Defense announced that the efforts to appropriate medieval monarchs as Belarusians were an example of information warfare. “The conflict with the Belarusians is pre-programmed,” said Valdas Rakutis, a Lithuanian historian who is now a ruling party politician. He was speaking to the public broadcaster and appeared to be suggesting a deeper conspiracy to foment conflict.

The Lithuanian government had initially taken a less strident tone in its response to Belarus’s growing interest in reclaiming their shared medieval history. After all, it was mainly the pro-western Belarusian opposition that used the symbols to refer to a pre-Soviet history and culture and they had Lithuania’s support.

But this tolerant attitude changed when “Lithuanian” symbols began to be used by the government of Belarusian autocrat Alexander Lukashenko. In 2012, Belarus sponsored the staging of a ballet honoring Grand Duke Vytautas, who ruled the Grand Duchy of Lithuania for close to 40 years from the late-14th century. 

Vytautas became a much romanticized figure during a 19th-century Lithuanian revivalist movement that paved the way for independence from the Russian Empire. And news of the ballet caused consternation in Lithuania.

Many Lithuanians were now resentful that Belarusians, over the last decade or so in particular, had begun to claim for themselves what Lithuanians had unquestioningly grown up to believe was their history. 

“Eventually a generation will grow up — or maybe it already has — which will think that Lithuania is a misunderstanding and that Vilnius should be annexed to Belarus,” Rakutis told Lithuanian media. 

Rūstis Kamuntavičius is an academic, an expert on the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania. His style is teasing and informal, often sarcastic. Kamuntavičius has little patience for the growing rancor in the competing claims and interpretations of the Grand Duchy’s history and what it means to the identity of present-day Lithuania and Belarus. 

He thinks, for instance, that the Lithuanian fear of Belarusians appropriating Lithuania’s knight is both “hysterical and ignorant.” 

“I’ve had fights with Lithuanians about it,” says Alex Smantser, a Belarusian expat in Canada, on the use of medieval symbols. “This [rift] emerges at various history gatherings — when they see the mounted knight symbol, they say, ‘he’s ours’ and I say ‘he’s ours’. And so it begins.” 

Smantser felt so drawn to the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that he started identifying as a pagan and a Litvin rather than as Belarusian — the latter, he says, doesn’t roll comfortably off his tongue. According to academics, “Litvinism” is the ideological position that Belarus is the true heir of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. 

“I can read [medieval documents] with my Belarusian language. Can they [Lithuanians]?” asks Smantser. The ruling elite of the Grand Duchy had Lithuanian names but wrote in a Slavic language historians call “Chancery Slavonic.” The large Slavic population of the Grand Duchy spoke Ruthenian, a  predecessor of modern-day Belarusian and Ukrainian.

“There used to be robbers, bandits,” Kamuntavičius says, only half-joking. “They convened into groups and went to kill and pillage neighbors. What difference does it make what language they spoke?” He adds that “there are few [primary] sources from the 13th century, so we’re mostly speaking about interpretations and re-interpretations. Historians construct the past, and these constructs then compete.” 

In the Soviet period, Belarusian schoolchildren were taught that in the Middle Ages Lithuanian and Polish nobles oppressed Belarusian and Ukrainian serfs. As a result, few Belarusians and Ukrainians felt they could identify with the Grand Duchy’s elite and take pride in its military and cultural glories.

Even the Encyclopedia Britannica describes the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as “essentially an international or nonnational formation led by a foreign dynasty (of eastern Lithuanian pagan origins) ruling over predominantly Belarusian and Ukrainian populations.” 

Meanwhile, in Lithuania, the grand dukes have always been important cultural icons. Even under Soviet rule, when national identity was suppressed, over 1,500 babies born in 1958 were named after Vytautas. Off the top of my head, I can think of a political leader, an actor, and a former classmate of mine named Vytautas. 

Today, in a country of fewer than three million inhabitants, over 28,000 men owe their names to a 15th-century grand duke. Vytautas is the second most-popular name in Lithuania, after Jonas (the Lithuanian version of John).

Maryia Rohava, who researches contemporary Belarusian identity politics at the University of Oslo, says that, unlike Lithuania, Belarus has not incorporated any memorial days related to the Grand Duchy into its official calendar, and that the state tolerates rather than actively promotes identification with that period. “When I conducted my focus groups and was asking people about different periods, some did mention [the Grand Duchy] as a way of saying that we did have some proud moments, but they still didn't know how to connect it into one coherent story,” she says.

Before 2020 — when thousands of Belarusians filled the streets to protest rigged elections — the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was not seen as problematic, Rohava says. Indeed, Lukashenko was warming to medieval imagery as a means to distinguish Belarus from Russia.

Kamuntavičius traces Minsk’s efforts to claim the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s history as its own to 2005, when the Lukashenko regime started to rebuild palaces and redraw historical maps. At the time, Belarus feared being reabsorbed into Russia and also wanted to take advantage of opportunities offered by the European Union’s “neighborhood policy,” intended to foster closer economic ties in the south and the east and catalyze development. 

Born and raised in Belarus, Smantser moved to Canada to escape the country Belarus had become under Lukashenko. He argues that Lukashenko should not be allowed to hijack a discussion about history. He says Lithuania’s exclusivism and its protectiveness about its medieval history is disappointing. This history, after all, is shared across several countries in the region. 

The Grand Duchy’s history was rich in “memorable events and personalities,” write Belarusian researcher Marharyta Fabrykant and U.S. researcher Renee Buhr in the academic journal “Nations and Nationalism.” So locating and identifying with these icons helps small nations feel “destined for greatness, yet victimized by enemies on all sides.” 

Some Lithuanian historians argue that if Slavic culture and the Duchy’s cosmopolitan heritage was given short shrift in the past it was because Lithuania was seeking to forge a national identity. They say Belarusians are dealing with a similar process of national reckoning, albeit a century later. 

Fabrykant and Buhr have compared Belarus to countries like North Macedonia, with its ubiquitous statues of Alexander the Great — a historical figure claimed by the Greeks. Grand Duke Vytautas (Vitovt in Ruthenian) is also called the Great, and his baptismal name was Alexander. To celebrate him, Belarus has named its bus brand “Vitovt Electro.”

For many years, Lithuanian academics such as Kamuntavičius explored and debated these competing interpretations of histories with fellow specialists. Indeed, Kamuntavičius was better known in Belarus, where these debates had currency, than in Lithuania. But in 2013, he came to the attention of his compatriots.

That May, Kamuntavičius gave a talk to Belarusian academics in his signature playful style. Instead of glorious victories, he spoke of fear and chaos. He tried to complicate the romanticization of Vytautas, the great hero of Lithuanians. A few months later, Lithuanians became aware of the contents of Kamuntavičius’s talk. “I was called a traitor on [prime-time news],” he says. 

“This person is being used as part of information warfare, a cog. Doesn’t he understand this,” asked the news show’s host, Nemira Pumprickaitė. A well-known far-right blogger wrote about Kamuntavičius that it is “difficult to believe that this is not some Kremlin propagandist speaking.” 

He added that by employing Kamuntavičius, Vytautas Magnus University (yes, named after the grand duke) was revealing itself to be an “asylum of spiritual paupers.” The right-wing youth movement Pro Patria designated Kamuntavičius as an “anti-state actor,” who hides behind slogans of academic freedom and democracy. “Is [the university] a hotbed of anti-state activity,” the website’s editors asked. 

“It was stressful, I received a ton of emails,” Kamuntavičius remembers, “and everyone was saying, ‘you’ve sold yourself to the Russians.’ It was the first time I felt attacked for doubting.”

In 2020 Belarusians from all walks of life took to the streets to protest the allegedly rigged elections. Police violence and arrests followed, only encouraging more people to attend mass rallies. Lithuania offered support to protesters and sheltered fleeing opposition activists, including Lukashenko’s main challenger Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. Protests kept flaring up well into 2021, and repression followed.

The protests were marked by the use of the country’s “white-red-white” flag (a century-old flag adopted by the democratic opposition to Lukashenko) and a medieval knight symbol, after repressions against Belarusian Grand Duchy heritage activists became known to the protesters. 

“These symbols were familiar to people from school,” says Vilija Navickaitė, who works at the Swedish International Liberal Center, “but they were lifeless and mostly theoretical.” She adds that for “some young people both the flag and the medieval symbols were a completely new discovery. Now they signify their struggle for freedom and change.” 

“We have different languages, but a single history, and it shouldn’t be divided,” says Smantser, the Belarusian who now lives in Canada and strongly identifies with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He tells me that he empathizes with the Lithuanians’ attachment to their history more than he once did. “But the stance ‘it’s us, only us and no one else’ is a sign of weakness.” Living in Canada makes him believe that a multilingual state that is proud of its shared heritage is not a pipe dream.

Kamuntavičius says he has found there is now an appetite for his work in Lithuania. No one calls him a traitor or a cog in the Russian propaganda machine any longer. But it’s hard to tell what will become of this new-found willingness to explore their shared history if Belarus continues to grow closer to Putin’s Russia.

Media outlets in both Lithuania and Belarus reported earlier this month that statues of Vytautas and his cousin Jagiello, who became King of Poland in 1386, were removed from a national museum in Minsk. This suggests, as one opposition figure put it, that “Russification is underway in Belarus.” 

With Lukashenko moving ever closer to Putin – a closeness that grew in part as a result of Lukashenko’s post-protests paranoia and that has culminated in his steadfast support of Russian aggression in Ukraine – perhaps the time has again come for him to play down or altogether ignore Belarus’s medieval ties to both Lithuania and Poland, not to mention Ukraine.  

Will the Grand Duchy of Lithuania be a symbol of solidarity once more for only the Belarusian opposition? And will that make it easier for Lithunanians to share the symbols of a medieval history of which they believed they were the sole custodians?

Belarusians are making intriguing contemporary art, Kamuntavičius asserts, because they have learned to “live with contradictions.” 

Lithuanians too must conclude, he says, that answers that were once comforting no longer apply, that history is messy and subject to interpretation.

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The post Medieval history powers a crisis of identity in Lithuania and Belarus appeared first on Coda Story.

Delivering newspapers in Belarus is dangerous work.

Distributors wear hoods to hide their faces and gloves so they won’t leave fingerprints. They work late in the evening, changing their routes to avoid being noticed. Once past the front door of an apartment block, they find a quiet spot to start work. They stuff leaflets into mail boxes, or leave them in piles where residents can easily find them.

If they are seen, distributors are told to hide the newspapers in their coats or bags. If they are caught by police, they claim the leaflets were never theirs to begin with. 

This is the new Belarusian samizdat: clandestine, self-made publications that seek to spread trustworthy information under a government dedicated to keeping it hidden. But unlike Soviet-era samizdat that came before it, Belarus’ new free press is a hybrid, digital-and-print operation. While its delivery is decidedly low-tech, the network of volunteers behind it uses anonymous, decentralized apps to enlarge its reach and minimize individual risk. Distributors take the materials from online publications, but then print out the leaflets at home — ready to be handed to friends, neighbors, and people who rarely use the internet.

In this world, samizdat starts life on Telegram, one of the few platforms where Belarusian oppositionists can connect and gather news. Belarusians flocked to the encrypted messaging and news-sharing app in the summer of 2020, when President Alexander Lukashenko secured a sixth term in office, despite widespread allegations of election fraud and declarations by foreign governments that his win was not legitimate. The country saw the largest protests in its history, and riot police violently subdued demonstrators who opposed the results.

Belarus has since seen a stream of politically-motivated prosecutions, a constant reminder that dissent will not be tolerated. Even the most innocuous events have led to fines or prosecution. One woman was jailed for 18 months for “insulting” photoshopped images of Lukashenko on her phone. Another was fined because her socks were reminiscent of the opposition flag. This has all amounted to a quiet, uneasy national atmosphere, in which Belarusians must constantly second-guess the authorities, and those who support the opposition are afraid to say so publicly.

While Telegram has become the go-to platform for Belarusians seeking out trustworthy news, it is not reaching everyone. Most users are in or near Minsk, the capital.

Enter ByProsvet, Belarus’ samizdat aggregator. This volunteer-driven effort has built a bridge between online and offline worlds, seeking to reach people who otherwise might not have access to reliable news and information. Members of the group live both inside and outside the country, and identify as “citizens of the Republic of Belarus who are not indifferent to the future of our country.” The “By” in their name is shorthand for Belarus, while “Prosvet” in Russian means “clearance” or “light.”

Using a Telegram bot that automatically distributes news and information to the network, ByProsvet invites users to download PDF files, print out physical copies of the newspaper, and then distribute them by hand. Activists can then use another Telegram bot to update an online map, showing readers where they can find the latest print-outs. All of the team’s printed materials include the handles of independent Belarusian news sites operating elsewhere on the internet, inviting readers to seek out more information online. While most of the work happens on a volunteer basis, ByProsvet uses a crowdfunding platform to cover larger expenses.

The leaflets include reports on government repression, often spotlighting cases in the specific areas or towns they serve, and interviews with protestors or Belarusian opposition leaders. Some also share news on broader topics such as the war in Ukraine or the migration crisis on the Belarusian-Polish border, which have been distorted by Belarusian government propaganda. Some articles are written by individual publications, while others are repackaged from other digital media outlets.  

The process provides a somewhat secure separation between those writing and editing each newspaper, and those distributing and reading it. The decentralized system makes it almost impossible for security services to bring down the entire operation, or to arrest larger groups behind it. But it is not fool-proof.

People who are caught with a small quantity of newspapers usually get fined, explains Zhenya, an editor for the samizdat outlet Belarusskiy Vestnik, or “Belarusian Bulletin.”

“The people who work with us are connected to us — they are under our full care. We pay fines, and if necessary, we also pay for people to leave Belarus,” they say.

One volunteer, Arciom Fedasenka, was arrested after printing samizdat at his own private publishing house in May 2021. He was jailed for four years in a maximum-security prison for “participating in group actions in gross violation of public order.” Another, Aleh Haurylau, was arrested for printing and distributing samizdat, and is now in pre-trial detention for “insulting the president.”

Go small, or go dark: Countering the media crackdown in Belarus

“All sources of alternative opinion have been destroyed in Belarus – everything,” says Zhenya.

“Given that far from 100 percent of the population has access to the internet, people simply have no choice. They only have access to one opinion: that of our unrecognized president and his junta. We know what happens when the people have no access to alternative opinions. We’ve seen it with Russia,” they say.

Indeed, as anti-government protests grew larger and more frequent after the 2020 elections, so did state efforts to snuff out the country’s few independent media outlets. In August 2020, one of the country’s biggest outlets, Komsomolskaya Pravda in Belarus published images of demonstrators who had been badly beaten by police. Authorities quickly stripped newsstands of remaining copies of the newspaper, and Belarusian printing houses refused to publish future editions. The outlet’s news site was finally blocked in September 2021, on grounds that it "could produce threats to national security, including through the artificial irritation of tensions and conflicts in society." Prominent news channels on Telegram have been targeted too. In October 2020, Nexta Live, which offered extensive coverage of post-election demonstrations, was declared “extremist” by a Minsk court. Today, most Belarusian opposition media are based abroad. 

Sasha, a ByProsvet volunteer, explains that under Belarusian law, print magazines and newspapers with a circulation of less than 299 copies don’t need to be registered with the state. 

“We decided that we could act within the law by [printing] local newspapers and leaflets,” they say.

“We provide a tool that everyone can use. By printing and distributing newspapers in their own building, a person delivers the news to an average of 72 people,” says Nikola, the co-founder and editor of samizdat publication Chestnaya Gazeta, or “honest newspaper.” Nikola estimates that about 1.7 million copies of Chestnaya Gazeta have been printed since the project launched.

Who is reading the samizdat?

“If someone is capable of critical thought, then they are absolutely in our target audience,” says Zhenya. “We want to reach out to everyone; we want to give people the opportunity to take a critical look at what is happening.” 

Many of those that ByProsvet hopes to reach are elderly or may not be confident using technology in their daily lives. Samizdat publishers believe that many Belarusians are simply more likely to trust the printed word.

“For a huge segment of society, the rule that ‘if it's in the paper, it must be true’ still applies. For that reason, just spreading information via the internet isn’t enough,” says Zhenya.

While harnessing offline publication helps activists reach digitally-isolated Belarusians, it also allows the ByProsvet team to tackle digital-only problems. Their leaflets don’t just reach Belarusians who live in a completely offline world. They also reach ordinary people who may only visit a select number of government-controlled news sites, or those who tend to only hear the opinions of friends and family that echo their own.

The decentralized nature of the project also allows distributors to make their own decisions on where and how to share information, rather than putting them at the mercy of algorithms or major platforms. Instead, they can use their local knowledge to reach out within their communities and distribute leaflets where they think people will actually read them. 

Sasha believes that all of this is key to cultivating the long-term resistance that Belarusian activists hope to nurture. They see the samizdat as a way to carry the protest movement forward, even when it has left the streets.

“Now, when there are no active changes [happening in Belarusian civil society], newspapers, leaflets or stickers are motivation for people who support the opposition and a reminder that there are still others out there with the same values,” says Sasha. “They are a reminder that … Belarus’ current stagnation is not forever.”

Zhenya agrees. “[The people distributing and printing samizdat] have not given up … despite the terror unleashed by the self-proclaimed government against the people of Belarus,” she says. “They believe in victory and continue to fight.”

The post Belarusians are using Telegram – and their own printers – to deliver the news appeared first on Coda Story.

The Belarusian Railway online ticketing system was temporarily down on the day of the hack, but further consequences are not clear.

“Even Belarusian Railway itself can’t tell the full impact of the attack yet,” said an anonymous representative of the group. “Most of the databases are still not working. We attacked the business intelligence and analytics system so they don’t have the data to fully quantify their losses.” 

Last year, the group released troves of tapped phone calls and internal documents from police and interior ministry databases, providing evidence of a brutal police crackdown on protesters following the country’s disputed election in August 2020. 

In December the group wrote to Coda Story’s Glenn Kates in a response to a list of questions. Their answers are lightly edited for clarity.  

How much of your work is figuring out technical ways to hack into Belarusian databases and sites and how much of it relies on people still working from the inside? 

In some instances, we have been getting assistance from insiders that either were part of the system or are part of the system right now. Sometimes they advise on weak spots of different systems, and at other times, they help us with keys and passwords, or open the “backdoor” for us to come into the network, though this is rare. A lot, of course, depends on our skills. We don’t have any members who are or were professional hackers. So in the past year, we have learned how to penetrate online resources, mostly from hacking books and tutorials and a lot of hands-on training. We have failed a lot, learned from our mistakes, and refined our tactics. 

How much information do you still have that hasn't yet been released? Can you give me a preview of any upcoming investigations? 

We hacked many government databases and we have a vast amount of data now, so it takes a lot of time to process it. We believe that releasing our discoveries more gradually creates pressure on the regime since, in this case, it’s impossible to ignore us — we are in the news all the time. 

The only preview we can give you is our plan to identify fake passports issued for espionage purposes for KGB and other agents who pose a risk to Belarusians in other countries. We are also planning to check all the trips made by Lukashenko and his close circle. This will help reveal illegal activities and put sanctions on them. 

Have Belarusian authorities tried to make contact with you? Have any of your members been caught or come close to being caught? 

Belarusian authorities never tried to contact us. If they do this to discuss how they can surrender and start the transition of power, we would talk to them. No one has come close to catching us though. Special police forces are, of course, trying to infiltrate us, but nothing has harmed us in any way.

How do you protect the identities of people who send information to you? Can they feel 100% secure sending you information through Telegram? 

Yes, we created several tools and released tutorials on how to safely send information to us and to our bigger group, Suprativ, that encourages people on the ground to join the forces of resistance. We have many layers of protection, and it’s safe enough to send us information. The weakest point is the data on any individual’s personal device. That’s why the first thing we do is ask people to start fresh with us and instruct them on how to communicate safely.

We have a special application called Partisan-Telegram, aka P-Telegram, which we developed for the safety of Belarusians. It’s a modification of the original Telegram app. It deletes all the pre-selected chats and channels and accounts from the device upon entry of a false password when trying to access the app. Anyone can read the source code and make sure the app is safe to use.

Why do you use Telegram instead of other encrypted tools, like Signal? 

For most secretive communication we use peer-to-peer encrypted tools and platforms. That’s all we can say.

Do you ever worry about getting caught? Do you have a plan for if you are?

We acknowledge that we risk a lot, even probably our lives. However, we can’t just do nothing or stop our work to bring down the regime. We established safe means of communication so if one person gets caught for some reason, others that were connected to that person, won’t be identified. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation says that "privacy is a human right." Obviously some of your work has destroyed the privacy of your targets. And in just about every country in the world, hacking of government and private sites is illegal. Do you think ethical concerns about the work you do is warranted? 

Lukashenko has proved himself unable to have any dialogue with people who disagree with his beliefs. He has threatened many times to destroy people who stand against him and has said that he will never give up power unless he dies. 

Our work helps people protect themselves from the brutality of the police forces and resist the oppression from the regime. We put pressure on the government and try to change the regime. We know how much power we have in our hands and how important the security of private information is. That’s why we don’t touch the information of law-abiding Belarusians.

Let's take a recent post, where you accuse people of being informants against Belarusian protesters. How do you verify that the people you are accusing are indeed the people who did the things you're saying they did? 

Since we hacked the special database that contains everyone who was an informant at some point since the 2020 elections, we made sure that all the names and personal information we released were correct. 

I would like to learn a bit about you, without putting you in personal danger. How would you describe yourself as a person? Were you involved in politics or activism before the August 2020 election? 

Obviously, we can’t share any personal information. We are a group of different people with different personalities, but what we definitely have in common is the belief that Belarusians deserve a democratic, independent state with the rule of law and protection of human rights. 

As a journalist I've been overwhelmed by the optimism of Belarusians. Many tell me that despite everything, they are sure that they will win in the end. But few are able to give me a clear description of how that will happen.

In general, our focus is on avoiding physical violence unless we need to defend against imminent danger. We can’t reveal our plans, but we learn from all the well-known revolutions that used nonviolent means of resistance: boycotts, non-cooperation, and non-violent intervention (blockades and occupations). All of this is used and will be used.

The post Belarusian hackers on what it means to be a ‘Cyberpartisan’ appeared first on Coda Story.

My former colleagues are in prison. For many months my friends and I have found it difficult to get any attention from world media. Now something has happened that caught the attention of the biggest news agencies — but I wonder how long it will last. Is there any way to hold the attention? I feel like we’re all hostages here — and it’s scary. Now everything, any crime, has become possible here.”

I received this message from a friend in Belarus this summer, a couple of days after the nation’s dictator Alexander Lukashenko used a MiG fighter jet to ground an international commercial flight as it crossed "his" airspace and hauled off a Belarusian journalist and his girlfriend who had been living in supposed safety in Lithuania. A few days later the captured journalist, Roman Protasevich, appeared on state-run TV with visible marks of torture and confessed to treachery in scenes reminiscent of Stalinist show trials.

There was some outrage in what we like to call the international community; the words "hijacking" and even "terrorist act" were used. And then, as my friend feared, all was forgotten. Lukashenko faced mild consequences, such as a ban on the Belarus state airline flying into Europe. His message to anyone who dared to oppose him was more potent: I can do what I want to you, anywhere you might be.

I struggled to answer my friend’s plea. For a single event to be remembered it needs to be sustained by a bigger story that it flows into. Anyone who has played a memory game will know that you remember discrete things by putting them into a sequence where they take on significance as part of a larger whole. Likewise in media and politics, one scene only has power as part of a larger narrative.

But Lukashenko’s outrageous crimes haven’t clicked into a greater chain of meaning. And it’s not just Belarus. From Burma to Syria, Yemen to Sri Lanka, we have more evidence than ever of crimes against humanity — of torture, chemical attacks, barrel bombings, rape, repression, and arbitrary detention. But the evidence struggles to compel attention, let alone consequences. We have more opportunities to publish; we aren’t limited by geography; our audience is potentially global. Yet most revelations or investigations fail to resonate. Why?  

A connected narrative breaks apart

The collapse of the Soviet Union should have spurred introspection and encouraged us to exclude no one from the greater story of human rights against political repression. And, for a moment in the 1990s, this seemed possible. As the wave of democratization overturned both pro-Soviet and pro-American dictatorships across the world; as the International Criminal Court was set up in The Hague in 1998; as humanitarian interventions were waged successfully from the western Balkans to East Africa, it seemed that justice would be meted out more equitably. 

But then something different happened. Instead of letting more characters into the human rights story, the whole story collapsed. A situation where some victims got more attention than others was replaced by a situation where no victims got any sustained attention. The horrors of World War II had compelled the world to adopt the UN Declaration of Human Rights, at least in principle, and the post-Cold War catastrophes in Srebrenica and Rwanda had encouraged humanitarian interventions and created a momentum towards a “right to protect.”

In previous crimes against humanity, ignorance was always an excuse. From Auschwitz to Srebrenica to Rwanda, leaders could claim that they were either unaware of the facts, the facts were equivocal, or that events unfolded too quickly for them to act. But now we have access to omniscient media that often brings us abundant and instantaneous evidence — yet it means less than ever before. The tableau of crimes remains a mess of broken images.

This felt different in the Cold War. Then there seemed a connection between the arrest of one, single Soviet dissident and a larger geopolitical, institutional, moral, cultural, and historical struggle. Media, books, and movies of that time told the stories of discrete political prisoners and human rights abuses as part of a larger, joined-up tale in the great battle of freedom versus dictatorship, a battle for the soul of history. And the whole story made the public in democracies feel better about themselves, was part of an identity: we are on the side of freedom versus tyranny. There were institutions that supported this narrative and identity. Political prisoners would feel less vulnerable when information about their arrest was announced on the BBC or Radio Free Europe, taken up by Amnesty International, announced at the UN, raised by U.S. presidents in bilateral summits with Soviet leadership.

Together all these elements sustained attention. And when the West’s own sins were revealed, such as the CIA’s program of Cold War covert assassinations and coups in the 1970s, it meant there was an existing framework through which to capture the attention and outrage of the Western public.

There was what one might call a "grand narrative" that informed and enveloped everything from the behavior of states to literature and art to how people understood themselves. It was bound up with enlightenment ideals of "progress" and "liberation," where facts and evidence were something to be respected, confirmed or refuted by rational argument or verifiable evidence. Even the Soviet regime was locked into a language and worldview where rights – the rights of colonized peoples and the economically oppressed primarily — could at least matter theoretically. They even signed human rights pledges, which allowed Soviet dissidents to demand the Kremlin’s leaders "obey their own laws."

In this contest of grand ideas, with each side proclaiming its ideals as superior, space was opened for dissidents to demand that the powers live up to the ideals; in the periphery, these ideals were invoked to demand support by liberation movements, colonized by one camp or the other.

The grand narratives, of course, had their problems. They often privileged victims of rival ideologies while leaving continent-sized blind spots. Priests murdered in Poland by the Communists would get more attention in Western media than priests killed by U.S. allies in El Salvador. The Red Army crushing rebellions in Budapest and Prague was covered with infinitely more intensity than the crushing of British anti-colonial rebellions in Kenya.

Yet, “the checks written out in 1945 to the most vulnerable people in the world —marked 'international humanitarian law' — are bouncing” says David Miliband, the former British foreign minister and present head of the International Rescue Committee. We have entered what he calls the Age of Impunity: “A time when militaries, militias, and mercenaries in conflicts around the world believe they can get away with anything, and because they can get away with anything, they do everything.”

The collapse came partly from within. The language of rights and freedoms was hollowed out by leaders who misused it, leaving husks empty of meaning. The Soviet regime shredded the language of economic justice and equality — so that even today the mere mention of the term "socialist" is anathema to many in the former Communist bloc. In the West the lofty language of freedom and tyranny was deployed in the service of unprovoked wars and was sullied by war’s inevitable consequences. In 2003, President George W Bush had deliberately connected the battles of the Cold War with his vision for the Middle East ahead of the U.S. invasion of Iraq promising that “democracy will succeed” and “freedom can be the future of every nation.” Instead, the invasion brought civil war and hundreds of thousands of deaths; it enhanced Iran’s power and turned Syria into the fulcrum of a new authoritarian axis. Among people in rich democracies, it engendered cynicism, souring them on their own self-identity. Words imbued with powerful meaning in East Berlin and Prague lost their purpose in Baghdad. Images did too.

Along with this rot from inside was the attack from outside. The great leitmotif of contemporary Russian and now Chinese propaganda is that the desire for freedom and the fight for rights leads not to prosperity but to misery and bloodshed. Russian propaganda channels like to splice shots of people-powered revolutions in Syria or Ukraine together with images of the ensuing conflicts in those countries, as if the war was the inevitable product of revolts, rather than the response by dictatorships to crush them. Unlike democracy — the not-so-subtle message goes — dictatorship is strong and stable.

From grand narrative to a cohesive story

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was shared by two journalists: Maria Ressa, the editor of Rappler, in the Philippines, and Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, from Russia. And if we look at their work closely, we see something interesting emerging.

Maria Ressa’s plight could have been utterly esoteric to the world. She is a journalist under attack from the Philippine government for criticizing the extrajudicial murders committed under President Rodrigo Duterte. Journalists are attacked every day across the world, and in the Philippines are regularly killed without drawing much attention overseas. Even the mass killings Maria (who serves on Coda Story’s board of directors) reported on, with thousands killed by pro-government gangs, rarely merit a global headline. Yet Maria’s story held attention. How?

When she dug into what was happening to her, Maria saw that there was something in the form of Duterte’s attacks, his use of troll armies and cyber militias to intimidate, besmirch, and break his opponents, that was both new and universal. He was not merely imposing censorship, he was overloading social media with noise, so the truth was blotted out, distorting reality. Maria made the issue not just about the Philippines but also about Facebook, the harms of social media, the lawlessness of digital disinformation. Her campaign, and the way she told her story, led not just to the Presidential Palace in Manila, but also to Silicon Valley, to every election distorted by online manipulation, to every conflict fueled through digital hate campaigns, to every woman or minority bullied or harassed on social media, to any parent worried about what’s happening to their kids online. Her story became vital for any lawmaker and civil servant thinking about how to regulate this new frontier. It updated how we think about freedom of expression in the digital dimension, forcing tech companies to at least admit that inauthentic coordinated campaigns were not legitimate speech but a form of censorship. One real person saying one unpleasant thing is fine. But when a handful of trolls pretend to be thousands of non-existent people saying the same thing, that is something different.

And Maria’s research joined up countries that had never been put into the same sequence. No one has ever thought about Russia and the Philippines together. Their dissidents don’t meet. They were on different sides in the Cold War. But now these two capitals of online manipulation became part of one coherent story. Maria looked to investigations by Russian journalists to understand what was going on in her own country, began to see Russia and the Philippines as one frontline of digital authoritarianism.

And Russia was one of the birth places of another seemingly local issue that became a global narrative. When Russian activists and journalists first tried to tell the world, in the early Putin era, about how their regime was based on stealing money from state assets and laundering it in Western countries, most shrugged. Who cares? It might be bad for Russia, but it made London and New York richer, and the Kremlin weaker. It took a decade of slow, painful arguments and evidence-gathering to show that corruption in Russia and Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East was not just a local tragedy. It affected us too. It was also a way to infiltrate and undermine democracies, compromise our foreign policy, suborn politicians, fund far-right politics. It created an elite that used the influence and leverage to start wars and get away with it, because Western countries were now dependent on the corrupt investments. It was creating a world where the global rich were living with another set of rules, free of domestic justice anywhere, and that, in turn, was fueling the inequality and anger that undermined people’s faith in democratic institutions. And the enemy was not just in the Kremlin, but also among the middlemen and money launderers in respectable offices in New York and London.

It was a challenge to show that the tragedy of a hospital in northern Russia, pillaged by bureaucrats buying property in London, was also something that people in the Pentagon should care about. Today corruption (or to be more precise kleptocracy and money laundering) has become a central security agenda for the new U.S. administration. But it took years of work to unearth the links that lie buried beneath the noise of news and the narcissistic gaze of social media, and to make something seemingly tangential a story that runs through all our lives. 

So that is the task: to unearth the interconnecting tendrils of issues, intertwining roots of problems that crisscross the world more intensely than ever, and whose larger significance is yet to be discovered. Before, the grand narrative of democracy used to pass over us, like a plane that you could board from a platform called "human rights." Now we work with shovels. Prodding on a mound that seems just an anomaly in one corner of the garden, but upon excavating and pulling, its rhizomes lead us to the garden next door. This is a new mission for journalism. To work out why an issue in Manila is also about Silicon Valley and about Moscow and about you. To find the sudden intersection between countries no one ever thought about as part of a single map before. Because these new lines are there, they don’t need to be created — they need to be unearthed. And then one discrete event can have meaning for many, one newspaper article can resonate across borders. New publics, who never even thought of each other as having anything in common, can be brought together. And this new journalism needs to do more than just draw new lines and connect new audiences — it needs to dig out the contours of the discussion which offers the solution to the issues it unearths, offering its audiences a chance to transform from passive players to participants in the formulation of a future.

For though the old story of "waves of democratization," of easily defined and relatable "declarations of human rights" has faded, people still risk their lives and livelihood to protest and fight for….well, for what? We have had, in recent years, seen more protests across the world as at any time for decades. From Hong Kong to Tbilisi, Sudan to Chile. And, of course, Belarus. Belarus which was always dismissed as happy with its degenerate dictator, satisfied with the compromise between stability and rule of a single man. And then suddenly, impossibly, the whole country rose up. Not just urban liberals but pensioners and factory workers. 

But unlike in 1989, we don’t think of all these protests across the world together. Don’t see them as part of one inevitable, coherent History. The rights they demand are very different. The regimes they fight against don’t necessarily abide by old distinctions between democracies and dictatorships. And yet something still itches away at people. Some sort of underlying urge, a need that can’t be satisfied. What connects all these different movements? What will we find in our process of excavation? Maybe, lurking underneath is something coherent, all the tendrils leading to a whole, something alive, huge, all-remembering, global, terrible — preparing to give the epic troves of evidence, the terabytes of data recording crimes against humanity and abuse, a purpose, and a meaning.

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Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, has referred to himself as “Europe’s last dictator.” However, over the past 18 months, historic demonstrations have rocked the country. Beginning in the lead-up to the August 2020 presidential election, the protest movement reached a peak when Lukashenko won a sixth term in office with a landslide 80% of the vote. Numerous countries and international bodies, including the United States and the European Union, refused to accept the result, alleging widespread fraud and repression.

The Belarusian regime launched a swift crackdown on opposition voices. Over the past year, more than 35,000 people have been arbitrarily detained. Similar filmed confessions have provided a chilling illustration of the state’s zero-tolerance policy on dissent.

This is not the first time such footage has appeared as a YouTube ad. On May 23, a plane carrying the Belarusian blogger Roman Protasevich from Athens to Vilnius was diverted to Minsk after a report of explosives on board. Protasevich was promptly arrested and, the next day, filmed stating that he instigated anti-government protests. The video, in which the 26-year-old appeared dazed and distressed, was broadcast on Belarusian state TV. 

Immediately, the footage appeared on YouTube as an ad. A similar video of his girlfriend Sofia Sapega was also promoted on the platform. According to screenshots, both appear to direct viewers to the Zheltye Slivy Telegram channel. The online news organization Rest of World reported that the ads appeared to have been paid for by a pro-government YouTube channel.

YouTube promptly removed the ads of Protasevich and Sapega, but in the months since, similar footage of other young Belarusians has appeared on the platform, repurposed as advertisements, a number of times. So, why does this keep happening and what does YouTube plan to do about it? 

From to rare free space to tool for oppression 

According the Belarusian journalist and Atlantic Council fellow Hanna Liubakova, YouTube ads provide Lukashenko’s government with a powerful tool to control the narrative surrounding the protests. 

“All media in Belarus is either banned or pushed out. YouTube is one of those services where media is actually able to publish, and that’s how many people in the regions may get access to independent information,” she said.  

The ads can also be viewed as an attempt to intimidate opposition voices and a show of strength by the regime. By allowing them to be shown on the platform, YouTube is “legitimizing the regime’s actions,” Liubakova added. 

How does this keep happening?

It is not clear how content of this nature continues to make it through YouTube’s approval process. The review system, which is run by Google, the platform’s parent company, should flag material that violates its terms of service, including  “bullying or intimidation of an individual or group.”

“I think that there was just a lack of moderation,”Liubakova said. “Or they just closed their eyes and ignored the fact that these ads are related to the regime and security forces.” 

According to Anastasiya Zhyrmont of the global digital rights organization Access Now, YouTube needs to be much more transparent and consistent as to what does and does not violate its policies. If Protasevich’s purported confession video was determined to violate the platform’s guidelines, she said, “others should be considered the same.”

What does YouTube have to say?

“YouTube has always had strict policies around the type of content that is allowed to serve as ads on our platform. We quickly remove any ads that violate these policies,” said a company spokesperson in response to questions for this story. According to Google, YouTube has taken action against the ad featuring Dalivelia, according to its inappropriate content policies.

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One week later, Moroccan authorities confirmed that Aishan had been arrested after a terrorism alert was issued by Beijing through Interpol. He now faces possible extradition to Xinjiang, China, where more than a million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim communities have been held in concentration camps in a crackdown described as “genocide” by the U.S. State Department in July.

“He's in frustration, he's really afraid. If he's deported to China, it's a death sentence for him,” said Abduweli Ayup, a prominent Uyghur activist. Ayup, who is based in Norway, where he runs an organization dedicated to assisting Uyghurs in exile in Turkey.

Ayup, who worked with Aishan at a Uyghur diaspora newspaper in Istanbul in 2016, told me that he speaks with his friend every week and that he is helping his family financially. 

“It’s devastating. He has three kids in Turkey,” Ayup said. 

Aishan’s case highlights how Interpol, the largest law enforcement organization in the world, with 194 member countries, can be used by authoritarian leaders and human rights violators to track down critics across international borders.

A red notice is an international electronic wanted persons notice issued and circulated by Interpol. The alert functions as a request to other countries to find and provisionally arrest criminal suspects who have fled abroad for extradition or other legal actions. Countries submit a red notice request to Interpol’s General Secretariat, which, after review, decides whether or not to release it to the police databases of member countries. Member countries can also issue a different alert called a diffusion, which notifies law enforcement authorities that they seek the arrest of a specific person. Diffusions are not published by Interpol but are circulated through the organization’s channels by the country itself.

While Interpol can serve as an effective vehicle for fighting crime, rights groups, lawyers and politicians have repeatedly voiced concerns that the issuing of red notices has been repeatedly abused by repressive governments — including China, Russia and Belarus — to target dissidents, journalists or political opponents seeking refuge in other countries.

“Democratic countries become aiders and abettors to oppressive regimes because of how Interpol works,” said Yuriy Nemets, a Washington D.C.-based attorney working on Interpol and extradition cases. He also runs the website Red Notice Abuse, which investigates how governments use Interpol’s mechanisms to persecute their opponents. “We talk about human rights and then don't really do much to stop being duped into helping these violators of human rights.”

Aishan’s wife Buzainuer Wubuli told me that she worries about her husband. She says that she can only talk to him once or twice a week for a couple minutes. 

“The Moroccan police didn’t say anything, so my husband doesn’t know anything,” Wubuli said. “‘Is there any news?’ He asks me every time he calls me.” 

Aishan is just the latest example of how red notices can be abused by authoritarian states. Last month, Makary Malakhouski, a Belarusian activist was detained near Warsaw after a red notice request from Minsk. Malakhouski was released the following day with the help of Polish politicians, lawyers and media. In July, Yevgeny Khasoyev, a Russian human rights campaigner was also detained in Poland after the Kremlin issued a red notice request. He has since been released. 

According to Interpol’s constitution, the organization, headquartered in Lyon, France, is forbidden from “intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character." However, criminal justice experts say that the system is vulnerable to abuse, including countries fabricating or misrepresenting charges against political dissidents.

“It's very rare that there's information in the red notice request that screams out abuse,” said Bruno Min, who leads a campaign for reform at Interpol at the U.K.-based NGO Fair Trials. “They're usually described as being, for example, terrorist offenses or fraud offenses.”

Min believes the problem rests with Interpol’s universal membership, which grants every country equal opportunity to send out thousands of alerts annually, some of which can be vaguely worded or prone to political abuse. “If Interpol were able to, for example, figure out that this is a Uyghur man, living in exile in a country outside China, given what we know about the human rights situation in Xinjiang, you would hope that Interpol would take that into consideration when deciding whether that red notice should be allowed,” Min said. “That's one thing that the case highlights — really questioning how good those mechanisms are.”

Attorneys, human rights activists and politicians have long pushed for reforms at Interpol, which currently has a backlog of over 66,000 active red notices. In 2019, U.S. politicians introduced the Transnational Repression Accountability and Prevention (TRAP) Act in the House of Representatives, which would aim to counter politically motivated Interpol abuse in the U.S., while encouraging reforms within Interpol. The bill has yet to pass the House. 

Amid growing criticism, Interpol has introduced a number of reforms in recent years. In 2015, it announced a refugee policy that would allow the removal of a red notice if an individual is classified as a refugee under the terms of the 1951 Refugee Convention. In 2016, it reformed guidelines for reviewing red notice requests by its General Secretariat, before they are circulated among other member countries. 

Other problems persist, however. Even though red notices can be removed, the risk of extradition persists and those under red notices face a broad range of difficulties, including being denied visas, bank services, jobs and political asylum.

“Interpol is an incredibly effective tool for governments not just to track down people, but to make their lives very difficult, even if they understand that the individual will never get extradited,” said Nemets. “Imagine, if it's a political opponent who cannot go to the bank, cannot travel, get a job, cannot obtain legal immigration status. How much more hellish can you make somebody's life?”

While Aishan’s red notice was canceled on August 25, based on as-yet-undisclosed new information received by Interpol, he remains in jail and could still be sent back to China after Beijing sent an official extradition request to Moroccan authorities to keep Aishan detained on the charges of inciting terrorism. 

Morocco ratified an extradition treaty with China in 2017. 

“If a previously issued red notice is found not to be in compliance with the Constitution and rules, it is deleted from INTERPOL’s databases,” said the organization’s General Secretariat in a written statement to Coda Story. “All member countries are also informed about the non-compliance of a notice or diffusion, and are asked to update their national databases accordingly, in addition to being reminded that INTERPOL’s channels may not be used for any communication regarding the case.”

On September 22, Morocco’s highest court of appeal set a new extradition hearing for October 27, adding at least another month to Aishan's detainment. 

His wife Buzainuer hopes the court will make a decision soon. She worries that her husband, who lives with long-term respiratory problems, might be vulnerable to harsh conditions in detention. “And now winter is coming," she said. "Every time the season changes or the weather gets cold, my husband coughs a lot, sometimes he can't sleep because of coughing. I'm worried that he can’t stand it and will become seriously ill.”

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The U.S.-funded news outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is just one recent example of how the law targets foreign-funded media. BBC Russia has reported that, in April, RFE/RL offered some of its staff the opportunity to leave the country, as it faces crippling fines. Russia has, so far, imposed penalties of nearly $1 million on the organization. The legislation could also lead to website closures and prison time for RFE/RL’s employees.'

Under the expanded legislation, individuals, not just organizations, can now be forced to register as foreign agents. Darya Apakhonchich, a Russian-language teacher from St. Petersburg, was one of the first individuals affected. Watch her story:

Darya's story is being repeated across the world as authoritarian leaders and anti-democratic regimes have adopted some of the same tactics.

Here, we look at five notable examples from around the world.

Nicaragua

By Erica Hellerstein

The closures came swiftly. In early February, the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, a press freedom organization founded by and named for the former Nicaraguan president, announced that it was shutting down. A day earlier, the Nicaraguan chapter of the global writers’ association PEN International released a statement that it was indefinitely suspending its activities in the country.

The two announcements came three-and-a-half months after Nicaragua’s Congress passed a controversial law requiring any organization that receives international funding to register as a foreign agent with the Interior Ministry and provide the government with detailed monthly reports about its expenditure. It also prevents any individual registered as a foreign agent from running for public office. 

The law passed easily in Nicaragua’s Congress, in which President Daniel Ortega’s party, the left-wing Sandinista National Liberation Front, holds a majority. Ortega was previously president of Nicaragua in the 1980s, after the Sandinista revolution ousted the former dictator Anastasio Somoza. He has been in power again since 2007, during which time he has orchestrated a dramatic crackdown on dissidents, journalists and political opponents.

Nicaragua’s foreign agent legislation was part of a package of restrictive laws introduced in the fall of 2020, including a cybercrime bill criminalizing a wide range of digital expression. Since then, the nation’s government has moved to revoke the legal statuses of 24 nonprofit organizations for violating the regulations, including medical associations critical of its handling of the coronavirus pandemic. 

“These laws have created this bureaucratic machinery that has made it really hard for NGOs to renew their charters or to meet all the requirements," says Enrique Gasteazoro, general manager of the independent investigative newsroom Confidencial. “​​At the same time, it’s important to note that the recipe of repression that the Ortega government doles out is not lacking variety, so you do have people in jail, organizations that are being de-facto closed, but you have this other slow, bureaucratic initiative to continue closing civic space."

Both PEN Nicaragua and the Chamorro Foundation said they were ceasing operations in direct response to the legislation. The law also came under fire from the U.S. State Department, which said it is driving the country “toward dictatorship,” and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. 

Critics say the law is part of a broader campaign by the Ortega administration to clamp down on civil society and political opposition, which is ratcheting up as the country heads into a presidential election in November. In 2018, the state response to anti-government protests over social security reforms left more than 320 people dead and thousands injured, “making it the worst wave of political violence in Latin America in three decades,” the New York Times reported. According to the United Nations, by 2020, more than 100,000 people had fled the country and sought asylum abroad.

Belarus

By Alexandra Tyan

In 2011, the government of Belarus, led by President Alexander Lukashenko, passed a series of amendments that established liability for local NGOs receiving foreign grants or donations if they did so in what it described as “violation of the Belarusian legislation,” and prohibited them from keeping funds in foreign banks. 

Any violation is potentially punishable with fines up to the amount of foreign funds received. 

That same year, an amendment to the criminal code, expanded the definition of treason to define any form of “assistance to a foreign state, foreign organization or their representatives in carrying out activities to the detriment of the national security of Belarus,” further increasing the possibility of NGOs and civil society groups being targeted by the authorities.

In the years since, Lukashenko has tightened his grip on civil society groups. New decrees in 2015 and 2020 introduced stricter requirements for the reporting of foreign donations and limited the permitted purposes of aid, prohibiting its use in development of the arts, scientific research and the prevention of human rights violations. Additionally, the nation’s Department for Humanitarian Affairs was given authority to oversee the use of foreign funding and allowed to give preferential treatment of state-approved projects.

And now, Belarus plans on taking these measures even further. In February, MP and chairman of the nation’s Liberal Democratic party Oleg Gaidukevich said that the government was working on a foreign agent law based on the Russian example. 

“No one can influence politics in a country, because any party, any politician, any organization that receives money for political activities works only in the interests of the country that gives the money.” he said in an interview. Gaidukevich then justified the plan by asserting that foreign funding is incompatible with democracy. 

According to experts, Lukashenko’s regime already has de facto power to limit the work of NGOs and civil society groups. “Everything is so bad that this law would not change so much. All of us are already foreign agents if our government decides it”, said Vadim Mojeiko, an analyst at the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies, an independent think tank based in Vilnius, Lithuania.

“For the Belarusian government, civil society is already one big foreign agent. That's why, if, formally, they call us foreign agents, it's not going to change the system.”

Poland

By Mary Steffenhagen

In Poland, a bill drafted in May seeks to require NGOs to disclose all of their sources of funding, raising concerns about the potential victimization of voices critical of the government.

The bill states that NGOs with a yearly income of over $250,000 should file information about their financing and activities to a public database. It is a revision of legislation proposed in 2020, which, at the time, drew direct comparisons to Russia's 2012 law and prompted international criticism. While the earlier draft was not passed into law, it would have required NGOs to detail the origin of their income if more than 10% of their funding came from foreign sources.

Filip Pazderski, a senior policy analyst at the independent Warsaw-based Institute of Public Affairs, sees the May 2021 bill as a backdoor way of discrediting NGOs in the eyes of the public.

“Precisely what is being said is that they're hostile to national values and traditions, what they do is not in line with Polish identity,” he said. “Meaning that they are working for foreign interests, not our Polish national interests that are represented by our government.”

The government of Poland has, for years, actively undermined the credibility of human rights and pro-democracy NGOs that receive foreign financial backing. It has squeezed funding to organizations that do not share its conservative values and raided the offices of independent civil society groups protesting the country's restrictive abortion laws.

However, Pazderski believes that Poland’s ruling nationalist coalition is wary of attracting criticism from the European Union. “I believe that our government now is quite reluctant to be seen as a bad guy in the EU,’” he said. “But, on the other hand, there are these possibilities of getting all the information about the activities of NGOs in one place that can be used against them.”

Egypt 

By Masho Lomashvili

Soon after President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi seized power in 2014, Egyptian authorities launched a crackdown on dissent. In the ensuing years, thousands of members of opposition groups, non-governmental organizations and activists have been jailed and tortured — some have even been executed. However, it took three years before it became nearly impossible for civil society organizations to operate. 

Justified by officials as protecting national security and guarding against interference from foreign-funded charities, a 2017 law enabled the nation’s government to surveil and control nearly every aspect of human rights monitoring, advocacy and reporting by NGOs in the country.

The legislation requires NGOs to seek permission to operate in Egypt from a “competent administrative entity” that determines whether the group’s work is in line with government objectives. Organizations are also required to detail their funding, activities and programs to the authorities. Non-compliance with the law can result in prosecution, including a maximum of five years’ imprisonment for NGO and civil society group workers and a fine of up to $55,000.

Activists decried the regulations as an attempt to block humanitarian work. The law’s passing also contributed to a 2017 decision by the Trump administration to freeze millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Egypt for nearly a year.

In 2019, following significant international and domestic pressure, Egypt’s parliament removed jail penalties from the law and replaced them with fines of up to $60,350.

According to Amr Magdi, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, Egypt’s NGO legislation bears all the hallmarks of Russia’s foreign agent law. “On government-controlled press channels, you see constant admiration for Russian laws and their government system which has kept Putin in power indefinitely,” he said.

Hungary 

By Mariam Kiparoidze

In 2017 Hungary’s parliament, headed by the right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, passed a law that imposed strict regulations on non-governmental organizations receiving foreign funding.

According to the legislation, NGOs in receipt of more than $24,200 annually from foreign sources must register as "organizations supported from abroad," or risk closure.

The government has said that the law, titled LexNGO, is intended to increase transparency and fight money laundering and terrorism funding. However, it is widely condemned by domestic and international rights groups as a means to stifle civil society organizations and individuals critical of the government. Orban has accused foreign-funded NGOs — in particular those supported by the Hungarian-born billionaire philanthropist George Soros — of domestic interference.

Human rights observers say the law was passed to intimidate NGO workers. “I don't think that the original intent of the government was to initiate any legal procedures,” said Demeter Aron, program director at Amnesty International in Hungary. “Some people resigned, some donors were turned away. There was a lot of time and money wasted on legal battles in front of the Constitutional Court,” he added.

Aron also compares Hungary’s law to Russia’s “foreign agent” legislation in both intent and context. 

“I think both laws have the aim to stigmatize independent civil society organizations and basically create an environment where the people that these organizations serve would not dare to turn to them,” he said. “It's pretty much a copycat of the Russian version.”

Last summer, the European Court of Justice ruled that LexNGO failed to comply with EU laws and was in breach of fundamental rights, including on personal data protection and freedom of association. In February, the EU commission sent a letter of formal notice to the Hungarian government, giving it two months to change the law. While Hungary repealed LexNGO in April, the government quickly brought in similar legislation, allowing the monitoring and selective auditing of NGOs whose assets exceed $66,480, on the grounds that they are "capable of influencing public life.”

Created with the support of Russian Language News Exchange

The post Putin’s playbook: Strongmen around the world are using Russian tactics to quell dissent appeared first on Coda Story.

On Sunday, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus used a military jet to intercept a commercial airliner and bring home the dissident journalist Roman Protasevich. 

The Ryanair flight was carrying 122 passengers from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania, when it was forced to make an emergency landing in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Witnesses say no one panicked, except for one young man, who grabbed his head and “began shaking.” 

It is chilling to imagine what went through the mind of 26-year-old Protasevich when he realized that the plane that was supposed to carry him from the safety of one European country to another was, instead, taking him straight to the nation where he stands accused of terrorism — a crime punishable by death in Belarus. 

Protasevich is the founder and former editor of Nexta and Nexta Live, two Telegram channels that played an important role in broadcasting huge opposition protests against the Lukashenko regime. As the president cracked down on the demonstrations with increasing brutality, Protasevich continued his work from the presumed safety of exile in Europe. 

Belarusian state media reported that Lukashenko himself ordered that the plane carrying Protasevich be stopped, so that he could be apprehended. It appears that the country’s authorities used a fake bomb threat and sent a fighter jet to intercept the plane and force it down.

After seven hours grounded in Minsk, the rest of the passengers were allowed to reboard and fly to Vilnius. They watched as Protasevich was taken away. “I will be executed,” were his last words to one of them. 

U.S. Ambassador to Belarus Julie Fischer has described the situation as “dangerous and abhorrent,” while European officials have slammed the Belarusian authorities and threatened “serious consequences.”  It is clear that Lukashenko’s decision to completely abandon international norms has created a new reality for hundreds of dissidents around the world, for whom even crossing the airspace of their countries could now pose a grave threat. 

What lessons other authoritarian leaders will draw from this episode depends on whether Lukashenko is allowed to get away with it.  And Russia appears to be playing a key role in making sure that he does. 

Russia has an uneasy relationship with Belarus, but over the past year, as both governments have faced waves of popular protest, the two nations have stuck by each other. Protasevich’s arrest, which placed 122 other passengers at risk, immediately raised questions about Moscow’s possible involvement. 

The question is important: if Lukashenko acted alone, the arrest of Protasevich could be a sign of desperation. If he acted with Moscow’s blessing, or even support, then this could be a much more serious geopolitical provocation, designed to test the willingness of the West to stand up to Russia ahead of the planned, though not yet scheduled, Putin-Biden summit.  

Russian journalists are investigating a theory that Russian operatives followed Protasevich in Athens, were on the plane and helped to carry out the operation. But there is a simpler, yet insightful barometer of the Kremlin's thinking: its own messaging. 

When things don’t go according to the Kremlin’s plans, Russian media tends to go quiet. Over the past five years, international scandals involving the Russian government — be they hacking revelations, the poisoning of opponents or the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 — have been characterized by an almost trademark few days of silence, during which the nation’s propaganda machine takes a deep breath to formulate its response, and only then launches into a full offensive.

But, this time, while European and U.S. politicians voiced their outrage and talked about new sanctions against Lukashenko, Russian state television was immediately on the case, spinning the narrative in the opposite direction. 

On Sunday night, Dmitry Kiselyov, President Vladimir Putin’s “propaganda tsar,” dedicated a 10-minute segment of his flagship show Vesti Nedeli (News of the Week) to Belarus.    

Kiselyov set the tone with two main messages about Protasevich’s arrest: first, that the West’s reaction revealed its hypocrisy, particularly in the case of the European Union; second, that there was nothing unusual about what Lukashenko did.

“The Americans arrest anyone they don’t like, anywhere they want,” Kiselyov said, bringing up a gallery of images of Russians who have been detained around the world. At the top of the list was Victor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer arrested in Thailand and extradited  to the United States in 2010, where he was convicted on several charges, including weapons trafficking and conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens and officials. 

Kiselyov’s second argument was based entirely on the 2013 case of Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, whose jet was forced to land in Austria after several European countries — pressured by the U.S. — closed their airspace to the plane, which was taking Morales home after a summit in Moscow, following a tip-off that Edward Snowden was on board. 

The story resonated. Within minutes, Twitter lit up with variations on the argument. From trolls to Russian diplomats around the world, a link to the Morales incident was ready to undermine every disapproving tweet about Protasevich.   

When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanded an international investigation into the “brazen and shocking act,” Dmitry Polyansky, a senior Russian diplomat in the U.S, replied with  #doublestandards and a demand for an investigation into the 2013 “hijacking” of Evo Morales plane.

The message quickly spread beyond the Russian bubble. “Why does the West pretend to be outraged when a nation imitates its gangsterism like the air piracy Belarus engaged in? Belarus didn't forget when the U.S. forced the plane of a head of state, Evo Morales, to land in order to arrest Edward Snowden & got away with it.” tweeted American activist Ajamu Baraka to his 90,000 followers, echoing the thoughts of a number of other influencers. 

Russia uses this kind of whataboutery because it has worked ever since the Cold War. In the words of Peter Pomeranzev, one of the world’s leading disinformation experts, the Kremlin exploits systemic weak spots and inconsistencies in the Western system by “providing a sort of X-ray of the underbelly of liberal democracy.” 

The Morales example, is in fact, pertinent, and there would be nothing wrong with pointing out the West’s double standards, were doing so not based on the assumption that two wrongs somehow make a right. Meanwhile, the West has remained tight-lipped regarding its own mistakes. 

Without an appropriate response from the West, the Kremlin is able to use this reliable and familiar strategy to muddy narratives, dampen outrage and plant seeds of doubt. As leaders in the West scramble over the penalties they want to impose on Belarus, Russia’s line is already making moral clarity and decisive action just a bit more elusive and Protasevich’s story easier to shrug off.

The post Opinion: Can Alexander Lukashenko get away with the dramatic arrest of a dissident Belarusian journalist? The answer lies with the West appeared first on Coda Story.

Minsk’s central district court ruled on October 20 that both Nexta’s channel and its logo are “extremist,” ordering the information ministry to restrict access to its content on the Belarusian internet.

The decision to act against the Telegram channel is unprecedented even for Belarus, where authorities have at times shut down the country’s internet to prevent people organizing protests and blocked access to independent online media sites. The channel is effectively the country’s main news source about the protests, with nearly two million people subscribed, a staggering number for a country of about nine and half million. The channel has lost about 10,000 subscribers since the court case was announced.

Coda has previously reported on the crucial role of Telegram channels sidestepping censorship from Belarusian authorities. Legal experts say they do not know how this ruling will affect subscribers or how the Nexta team operates in neighboring Poland.

“I want to understand whether we all need to delete this channel from our smartphones now, whether we can still repost content from the channel, and what we need to do next if we’ve previously reposted content from the channel,” Siarhej Zikratski, a lawyer based in Minsk, told Euroradio.

Tatiana Ravinskaya, a lawyer who spoke to EuroRadio, said that in the past the state has not prosecuted people for simply viewing material which is deemed extremist by authorities: “The law does not hold people liable if they view a link that is published in the country’s list of extremist material.”

A number of channels on Telegram have been targeted by authorities this year, with over a dozen administrators jailed. As the largest channel in the country, Nexta was an obvious target, especially as weekly nationwide protests have continued more than two months after the vote.

“Nexta is not just an important channel, it is the number one channel in the country that is organizing the protests themselves,” said Barys Hartetsky, deputy head of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, in a phone interview back in August when post-election protests began.

Nexta-Live announced in a statement that they are now working on a new name and logo for their channel.

Additional reporting provided by Euroradio, our partner in Belarus. Euroradio, as with scores of online news outlets, has been blocked in Belarus since election day on August 9.

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A day after the largest nationwide protests in the country's modern history, Lukashenko had helicoptered into the factory on Monday to secure support among a constituency long considered to be his base, but instead a scripted speech had been overwhelmed with chants of "resign."

Lukashenko, a former Soviet collective farm boss, approached the worker who had heckled him. Trying to control his rage, but his voice rising nonetheless, he exploded when he saw the person standing before him holding up a mobile phone. 

"Put down your phone!" he demanded.  

His concern was understandable. 

A week after he had officially been declared victorious in the August 9 presidential elections with a wildly improbable 80% of the vote, the country he had ruled for 26 years was convulsing in large scale protests, horrific riot police violence and factory worker strikes, all being broadcast and organized on Telegram, a telephone messaging app. 

"No question, it's a life necessity now for everyone in Belarus, because it's the only place where we can get authentic information," said Yevgeni Shabanov, a sales manager, who now regularly participates in protests and has sent videos of clashes with riot police to some of the most popular Telegram channels. 

“In some small app, in some little channel suddenly two million people appeared,” said Barys Haretski, deputy head of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, in a telephone interview. Haretski was  speaking about Nexta, the country’s most widely-read Telegram channel. Now with 2.2 million followers, its audience has more than quadrupled since election day. 

However, Nexta is just one of dozens of channels on which activists are organizing demonstrations and publishing news that their fellow Belarusians cannot access elsewhere. Telegram remains functioning in spite of a wider internet shut down that began on August 9 and continued in spurts throughout the rest of the week. Only Telegram stayed online thanks to an anti-censorship tool developed by the Russian-born founder Pavel Durov on August 10 which allowed users to circumvent the government’s blocking of internet traffic.

“The authorities have spilled blood and will not stop unless we show our will power,” read one post on the Nexta Live channel on August 18. The message was viewed by 1.4 million people and included a schedule and a map for a planned “Liberation March” to Okrestina, one of Belarus’ most notorious detention centers in Minsk.

Powering Nexta and Belarus’ other top Telegram channels is a small team of admins, who spend their time sorting through the videos and tips sent to them from subscribers and posting them to their audiences.

"It's very stressful because every decision you make, every post you make, can impact the lives of millions," said the administrator for a network of eight Telegram channels, including, Belarus of the Brain, the country's second largest channel. 

The administrator, who asked to remain anonymous because of security concerns, acknowledged the potential pitfalls this power could unleash, including spreading disinformation. "It can be used for good and it can be used for bad as well. It depends who's managing what," he said, in a phone interview.

Although Lukashenko has publicly railed against Telegram’s “bandit” channels, accusing users of “spitting” on Belarus, the authorities have failed to bring the platform under its control. More than 12 admins have been jailed, but their channels keep running thanks to team members who manage to avoid being identified.

According to Haretski, the authorities “blew it” when it came to neutralizing Telegram and online media. 

“For a long time the authorities have been chasing after print newspapers while people, en masse, have been moving to the internet. You could say that independent media took over the internet. The same with Telegram,” he said.

With virtually no popular pro-government channels on Telegram, the platform largely belongs to Belarus’ growing opposition. Now, even state TV reporters have left their jobs to join the nationwide strike against the embattled president.

A former major in the security services who spoke to Coda Story via messenger apps on the condition of anonymity said that while officers in the Belarusian KGB — the agency still bears its Soviet-era name — monitored opposition groups online, the majority of resources were spent on preparing riot police in the run-up to the election.

“Half a year ago we started preparing the guys morally. We were brainwashing them about how important it is to preserve the regime and that there is no other path,” said the 29-year-old, who was expelled from Belarus this summer and now lives in Poland.

He added that the security services had been preparing for protests of 7,000 people at the most, not the 500,000 who gathered in Minsk last weekend.

Many who continued protesting this week showed up to demonstrations with photographs of Belarusians who had been detained and beaten by police. Pictured after their release, some stood in their underwear, revealing bodies covered in bruises.

Zhenya, a 23-year-old from Minsk, was arrested and detained when coming home from a neighborhood shop.

“For six hours we had to stand on our knees with our heads to the floor,” he said, in a phone interview. “No toilet or water. They would say, ‘Those who want to go to the toilet, go where you’re standing.’”

Later, Zhenya said a police chief walked in with officers holding batons and starting yelling: “‘Who is the best president in the world?’” Everyone stayed silent, so they began to beat us.”

“They put us on top of each other, like in a game of Tetris, and then the officers sat on top,” said  Artyom, 23, in a  phone interview. He was arrested while in a grocery store with his girlfriend on August 11. “When the last person entered our cell, he got so scared he shat himself. One man had an epileptic attack.”

Waiting outside the detention centers were small armies of volunteers who had come to document the thousands of cases of police brutality and bring medical aid to those who needed it. These gatherings had all been organized on Telegram.

With additional reporting by Katerina Fomina, Elizaveta Antonova and Tatiana Torocheshnikova

Photo by Sergei Gapon/AFP via Getty Images

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Alone among European countries to shrug off the Covid-19 preventative measures that have put economies across the continent into hibernation, the Belarusian government has insisted the country is all but immune to the pandemic, claiming there are a mere 860 cases in a country of nine and a half million.

Since reporting its first cases of coronavirus in early March, President Alexander Lukashenko has only doubled down on his proclamation that “the most dangerous epidemic is panic.” By keeping businesses open and urging the security services — still operating under their Soviet-era name, the KGB — to investigate those spreading false information about the pandemic, Lukashenko has sent a clear message that he intends to keep the country open. 

The decision was a gamble by authorities who can’t expect a bailout from the West or international organizations to help its economy which was already in deep recession. “Belarus is a very poor country and it cannot rely on anyone,” said Ryhor Astapenia, a fellow at the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House. “They understand that they can’t afford a lockdown.”

Before the coronavirus hit Europe, the Belarusian economy was already in a tailspin from an ongoing conflict over oil prices with Russia and a dramatic fall in exports to China. The Belarusian ruble has been devalued by more than 20%. “From all sides there is what you can call a perfect storm,” said Artyom Shraibman, a political analyst at Sense Analytics, a consultancy group in Minsk.

Even as the number of Covid-19 cases in Belarus began to grow, President Lukashenko called the pandemic a “psychosis.” On March 28, he filled an arena with supporters to watch him play hockey. Lukashenko took a break from the game to assure a journalist that “there are no viruses here” and that hockey is the “best antivirus medicine.”

Although 70% of Belarusians say they support a government ban on public events, virtually no restrictions on public movement or gatherings have been put in place.

“Today we are the only country in Europe where you can legally organize a demonstration,” said Shraibman. “In Belarus — Europe’s last dictatorship!”

In Minsk the streets are noticeably less crowded with many companies, especially those in the country’s thriving IT sector, electing to switch to working remotely. However, with no state-wide quarantine announced many are still obliged to commute, keeping public transportation crowded during rush hour.

All of its neighbors have sealed off their land borders, however Belarus has, officially at least, kept its open. To the north, the president of Lithuania, Gitanas Nauseda, accused Belarus of “assessing the situation with a certain level of bravado,” adding that “the information coming from Minsk about coronavirus cannot be trusted.”

Lithuania, a country with nearly a third of Belarus’ population, has reported 880 cases of Covid-19.

The Belarus deputy minister of health, Elena Bogdan, told reporters that “nothing extraordinary is happening in our country” during a press briefing, causing outrage among the country’s small but vocal independent press.

“It’s practically impossible to verify any information with the Ministry of Health,” said Boris Goretsky of the Belarus Association of Journalists. “The government has taken the position of minimizing all information.”

The health ministry's strategy for releasing information on Covid-19 varies from week to week, Goretsky says. On some days, the ministry has published statistics amounting to arithmetic riddles, forcing reporters to do their own calculations from nationwide data to get a tally of those infected. On other days, the ministry releases a steady flow of clear information — or the total opposite, when the website simply doesn’t get updated.

Authorities also arrested an independent journalist on March 25 after he raised doubts about the accuracy of the ministry’s Covid-19 statistics. Accused of taking a bribe, journalist Sergei Satsuk was held in custody for 10 days. Following his release on April 4, Satsuk announced he will not publish any further investigations into the Ministry of Health.

At least one Belarusian doctor has spoken out.

“Help save the people of Belarus,” wrote Natalya Laryonova from Hospital Number One in Vitebsk in the north of Belarus. “The situation in our city is starting to get out of control,” Laryonova wrote in a post on her social media profile, adding that many doctors are already being hospitalized with pneumonia. “The numbers being published by the Ministry of Health are a complete myth.”

Laryonova was summoned to the local prosecutor’s office on April 1 where she was questioned about her social media activity and instructed to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

“I don’t regret what I did because it stirred things up here and more help started coming to hospitals,” said Laryonova in between a shift at her hospital. However she says she has deleted some of her online posts to not “escalate the situation.”

With the government announcing a modest $40 million coronavirus stimulus package last week — amounting to just about $5 per person — ordinary Belarusians have stepped in to address shortages in medical supplies. Activists in Minsk brought together over 140 volunteers with 3D printers to create high-tech face masks for doctors, some equipped with anti-bacterial filters. “Doctors do have some of their own weapons against coronavirus but we’re providing them with bullet proof vests,” said Anton Tryfanau, one of the organizers. So far 25 hospitals in Minsk and neighboring regions have signed up to partner.

Additional reporting by Mikalai Anishchanka

The post While Europe is in lockdown, Belarus remains open for business appeared first on Coda Story.

“To be a Eurasianist should be cool, it should be stylish.”

“Cool” is not the first word you would use to describe the scene. I am in a small conference room in Minsk, at the Belarus office of a Russian government agency called “Rossotrudnichestvo.” Linked to the Foreign Ministry, you could translate it as the “Russian Cooperation Agency,” and some describe it as the soft-power arm of the Kremlin. The crowd, divided roughly evenly between Russians and Belarusians, is a wonky-looking mix of rumpled middle-aged academics and eager students.

The advocate for Eurasian cool is Yuri Kofner, a fresh-faced 20-something from Moscow. The topic is how to make the Eurasian Union more popular in Belarus. It is one of the five member states of the supranational body launched by Russia in 2014 with great fanfare. Since then, depending on your perspective, it is either becoming a Russia-centered counterweight to Western groupings like the European Union, or drifting into irrelevance,

Kofner is dedicated to making sure it’s the former. “We need to do the same thing that attracts people to Europe,” he tells his audience. A Eurasianist is “a new patriot,” he argues, loyal to the idea of Eurasia, with Russia at its heart. “Europe has become boring for us,” he continues, “but that’s what we need to develop, that style.”

The Eurasian Union did seem to have style, even swagger, in its early days. In the run-up to its launch, Russian President Vladimir Putin called it “epoch-making,” imbuing it with the grand, anti-Western ideology of Eurasianism. Hillary Clinton, then the U.S. Secretary of State, helped feed that narrative by describing the Eurasian Union as a cover for Russian efforts to “re-Sovietize the region.”

But so far, it hasn’t lived up to that billing. No more states want to join its five members — Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as Russia. There’s even a faint sense of embarrassment in Moscow over the whole project. And the West is now more concerned about Russia’s cyber-meddling and continuing war on Ukraine. Meanwhile, China’s ambitious “One Belt, One Road” program, which covers much of the Eurasian Union’s territory, seems to be advancing decisively.

Yet in the meantime the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), as it is formally known, has become a fact of life. At least 1,000 people work at its Moscow headquarters, engaged in workaday bureaucratic tasks like coordinating financial markets and standardizing pharmaceutical regulations across the five member states. It has cut red tape for Kyrgyz labor migrants in Moscow and spawned an ersatz banana export industry in Belarus. But its economic impact has been negligible, analysts say. And Putin rarely mentions the EEU these days. So rarely, in fact, that I thought he had quietly abandoned his grand geopolitical ambitions for the organization.

But when I suggested this to people studying it, I got some pushback. If the Kremlin talks about the geopolitical side, it “only makes people upset,” said one economist I met in Kazakhstan. “They’re still doing this ideological work,” he added, “just more quietly.” And the person leading this effort, I was told repeatedly, is Yuri Kofner.

So that’s how I found myself in the conference room in Minsk.

There are really two Eurasian Unions. One is economic — based on a free trade pact. The other is geopolitical and ideological, driven primarily by Russia’s desire to remain a global power.

Kofner is a standard-bearer for both. He is doing his PhD dissertation on non-tariff barriers to trade in the Eurasian Union, and is the head of a new Center for Eurasian Studies in Moscow. He also runs the Eurasian Movement of the Russian Federation, which is devoted to promoting the idea that there is a unique “Eurasian” civilization in Russia and its neighbors, distinct from both East and the West.

In the corner of the conference room hangs a purple flag with an eight-pointed star, which some Eurasianists have informally adopted as their banner. Kofner’s Eurasian Movement website explains that it is a symbol common to Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, while the colour represents “a synthesis between Europe (blue) and Asia (red), Slavs (red) and Turks (blue), tradition (blue) and revolution (red), the market (blue) and planning (red).”

Kofner explained that his initiation into Eurasianism began while he was a student at the Moscow Institute for International Relations (MGIMO), the elite university training ground for Russia’s future diplomats. Reading the writings of classical Eurasianists and Slavophiles was an eye-opener. “They expressed what I had always thought about Russia, but couldn’t put into words,” he said. “It’s not an underdeveloped Europe, but an independent, unique world — a Eurasian civilization.”

That led him to set up a student “Eurasianist Club.” It is clearly the civilizational side of the Eurasian idea that most animates him, as he repeatedly referred to its economic agenda as “boring.”

But Eurasianism can be a hard sell. For many outside Russia, talk of trying to make Eurasianism “cool” just sounds like a new way of dressing up Russian chauvinism and imperialism. That strain of Eurasianism is exemplified by Russia’s most prominent Eurasianist, the controversial philosopher Alexander Dugin, who is also known for his openly ultra-nationalist and anti-Western views. For many outside Russia, talk of trying to make Eurasianism “cool” just sounds like a new way of dressing up Russian imperialism.

Kofner knows him personally, but tells the Minsk gathering that Dugin “distorts the true ideas of Eurasianism.” He goes further in his writings, arguing that the philosopher is wrong to focus so much on the perceived threat of Western liberalism. The real divide, Kofner says, is between “Eurasian authoritarian liberalism and Western monetary fascism.”

Far from being a Russian imperialist project, Kofner argues, Eurasianism offers a way for smaller Eurasian states to protect themselves against the imposition of foreign, Western values. (He does not address the fact that this could still be seen as another kind of Russian imperialism). To support his case, he points out that the vote of each member — from tiny Armenia to giant Russia — has equal weight. Focusing on Belarus for his audience, he argues that it should maintain “an identity that looks both to the West and to the East.”

Yet even this friendly crowd is skeptical. One young Belarusian academic, Igor Avlasenko, highlights what he sees as the “contradictions” in Russia’s position, ostensibly promoting the Eurasian Union while acting very much as a lone big power. He pointed out that Putin had recently approvingly quoted Tsar Alexander III’s famous line that “Russia has only two allies, its army and its navy.” None “of the other members of the Eurasian Union were mentioned,” Avlasenko adds.

Another participant perhaps unwittingly highlights the central contradiction of the project — as he calls for other member states to have a greater role in driving the Eurasian Union and its ideology. If Russia comes up with an idea, “that is imperial ambition,” says Kirill Koktysh. “But who could accuse, say, Belarus of having imperial ambitions?” he continues. “It’s kind of funny, right?”

Outside of think tank conference rooms, it’s hard to measure the real-world impacts of the Eurasian Union. Its launch has coincided with a number of other large economic trends in the region: an economic crisis caused in large part by low oil prices, Western sanctions against Russia, and many EEU currencies seeing significant devaluations.

It is hard “to decouple” these trends from the effects of joining the EEU, said Roman Mogilevskii, an economist at the University of Central Asia in Bishkek. “If you clean out these major shocks, the effects of the Eurasian Union are not as big as everyone expects. You have some positives and some negatives.”

Adding to the confusion is the fact that the debate around the EEU is highly politicized, with proponents tending to be pro-Russia, and opponents anti-Russia. The volatile economic situation therefore makes it easy for both sides to cherry pick data to prove that the union is either a great success or a disaster.

A Russian European Union

The EEU is run day-to-day by the Eurasian Economic Commission from a nondescript office park in Moscow. Led by former Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan, the commission is developing plans to further integrate the member states’ economies — a common market for pharmaceuticals this year, electricity by 2019, and financial markets by 2025. It has signed a free trade agreement with Vietnam and has started negotiating similar pacts with Egypt, Iran, India, and Singapore.

The commision wouldn’t give me an interview. So I got a coffee at the Starbucks next to the main entrance instead, and people-watched as staff, dressed in business casual and carrying briefcases and backpacks, bustled in and out of the brick-and-glass headquarters building. The scene would not have looked out of place in, say, Brussels.

That is no coincidence. In spite of its ostensibly “Eastern” ideological orientation, the EEU is explicitly modeled on the European Union and its ethos of integration. Many of its key officials are also steeped in EU thinking, having been educated at European universities in the 1990s, according to Vasiliy Kashin of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. “They know the European bureaucracy in detail,” he added. “They are not some Orientalists.”

And for all the political tumult these days over the merits of free trade and concerns about the EU’s long-term viability, its Russian counterpart is not offering anything radically different.

It is important to remember that the EEU was also borne out of rejection by Europe — as the Kremlin sees it. In the early years of his presidency, Putin tried to persuade the EU to allow Russia to integrate on its own terms, recognizing its special size and influence. This was “a really sincere” goal, according to Alexander Gabuev, a Russian foreign policy analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center.

But as the 2000s progressed, Putin decided such efforts were futile, and that the West had no intention of treating Russia as an equal. President George W. Bush’s unilateral invasion of Iraq cemented his view that the U.S. wanted to monopolize global power instead. And he saw the revolutions in neighboring states like Ukraine and Georgia — leading to anti-Russian leaders gaining power — as the start of a Western conspiracy aimed ultimately at Russia. He cracked down on domestic opposition in response, further alienating Europe.

The Kremlin concluded that Russia needed to be “the center of gravity in the post-Soviet space,” says Gabuev, enabling it “to talk on an equal footing” with the EU and the wider West. And this became the major political idea behind the EEU.

Gabuev was wearing a hoodie when we met. He is a former journalist who used to cover Russian foreign policy and speaks fluent, American-accented English. He reminded me of a 2011 piece Putin wrote for the newspaper Izvestiya — during his brief period as prime minister — in which he laid out his vision of the EEU as a “supranational union that could become one of the poles of the modern world.” It would be a bridge, he hoped, “between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific region.”

Yet even those hopes for the Eurasian Union’s role faded, as Putin saw new threats coming from the West. By 2013, he had returned to the presidency, and the EU was preparing to sign “association agreements” with Armenia and Ukraine. The Kremlin concluded that Russia needed to be “the center of gravity in the post-Soviet space,” enabling it “to talk on an equal footing” with the EU and the wider West. — Alexander Gabuev, Moscow Carnegie Center

Moscow responded by announcing a major arms deal with Armenia’s enemy, Azerbaijan, and floated rumors that it might increase the cost of gas supplies to the country. Yerevan got the hint: it abandoned the EU and said it would join the Eurasian Union instead.

Putin also began to put more emphasis on the concept of a Eurasian identity and civilization. In a landmark speech in 2013 — only two weeks after Armenia had turned its back on Western Europe — he said the EEU was not just about mutually beneficial agreements, but “a project for maintaining the identity of nations in the historical Eurasian space.” But his efforts to woo Ukraine into the Eurasian fold ended in disaster.

When Ukraine’s President, Viktor Yanukovych, announced that he, too, would turn his back on the EU in favor of the EEU, the Maidan protests erupted. That led to his ouster in 2014 and a new anti-Kremlin government taking over. Putin responded by annexing Crimea and backing the war in Eastern Ukraine, destroying relations with the West but also any hopes of luring Ukraine into the Eurasian Union.

For Eurasianists, the geographic boundaries of “Eurasia” are pretty hazy. But one thing they are sure of is that Ukraine is an integral part of it. So as they see it, a Eurasian Union without Ukraine is no Eurasian Union at all.

“We lost someone along the way,” quipped the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, when the EEU was formally launched in May 2014. “I mean the Ukraine that started this hard work together with us.” Putin was visibly annoyed. And Gabuev says he has heard some senior Kremlin officials say privately that launching the EEU at that point was “premature.”

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Putin still sounds bullish about the project when he mentions it—most recently in his annual marathon news conference. It is “our huge joint achievement,” he told his live audience, before adding: “there is always a lot of criticism, but the numbers show that our decisions were right and that we are moving in the right direction.” But gone now are the lofty references to identity and new civilizations.

Some believe the EEU has become as much a defense mechanism as a mask for imperialist expansion. A key reason for its launch was to prevent “another Ukraine,” according to a “Kremlin-connected insider” quoted in a study of the Eurasian Union for an EU-linked security think tank. The goal is to lock member states into a Russian orientation, even when their leaders change. Putin’s nightmare is the death or removal of Lukashenko in Belarus and Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan, the EU report’s source said. They are both strongmen leaders, but presiding over weak institutions and Putin wants to ensure their successors “have no choice” but to stay inside Moscow’s embrace.

The EEU also helps the Kremlin block member states from pursuing bilateral relationships that it regards as threatening its interests. For example, if Armenia wanted to sign a free trade deal with its neighbors Georgia or Iran, it couldn’t. That authority is now vested in the Eurasian Union. Being a member is “not allowing us to develop our economy, our ties with other countries,” complains Edmon Marukyan, an Armenian MP leading a campaign to pull out.

But by the same token, Russia’s freedom of manoeuvre is also constrained. The group operates on a consensus basis, with every state getting a veto, a concession the Kremlin agreed to because it thought that was the only way it could get Ukraine to join. It means, for instance, that Armenia has veto power over Russia’s trade policy. “For me that’s insane,” Gabuev says, before adding this telling caveat. “Ok, Armenia is not a problem because you can always pressure them and they literally never object to anything.”

Belarus, however, is different in Gabuev’s view, because it has “tough, nationalist-oriented people on the commission who are pushing the interests of Belarusian industry.” This, he says, “definitely limits Russia’s ability to do stuff it could be doing on its own.”

In fact, member states have proved frustratingly independent from Moscow at times. When the West imposed sanctions on Russia in response to its annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin tried to get the EEU to impose its own counter-sanctions. But the other member states refused to go along, forcing Russia to go it alone in blocking certain Western products. Belarus responded creatively, importing Western goods and re-exporting them, duty-free, to Russia, resulting in “Belarusian” bananas and salmon appearing in Russian supermarkets.

Even the structure of the union represents a major Russian concession to the demands of its other members, particularly Belarus and Kazakhstan. Both states demanded that it was only a free trade agreement, specifically excluding any political component, and this was enshrined in the formal name: the Eurasian Economic Union. From Russia’s point of view, Ukraine is an integral part of the historical Eurasian space. And so from a pure Eurasianist perspective, a Eurasian Union without Ukraine is no Eurasian Union at all.

But the Kremlin has not given up on turning the EEU into something bigger. One proposal that regularly comes up is to start a common currency, in spite of Belarus and Kazakhstan regularly insisting that they want to keep with their own money.

Less than three years into its existence, proponents of the Eurasian Union say it is still too early to judge its record. “The EU has existed for 60 years and only this year has it eliminated mobile phone roaming charges,” says Yuri Kofner.

His work is a sign that the Kremlin still harbors big ambitions for the union, even if they have been put on hold for the moment. Kofner is one of the Kremlin’s “intellectual entrepreneurs,” says Yuval Weber, a professor at the Higher School of Economics. They are people who can be funded relatively cheaply and kept in reserve in case they are useful one day. The government may need another “Dugin-like figure” in the future, says Weber, but someone who is “cleaner and more presentable to foreigners.”

Kofner barely hides his impatience for the Eurasian Union to move faster and be bolder. He acknowledges the anxieties of other members, but argues that working with Russia is in their long-term interests. “Russia in its bigness, in its vastness, is of course taking bigger steps than other countries,” he told me, trying to distil his thinking. Russians “want to go forward, but they know if they go forward at the normal Russian pace the other countries will say wait, it’s imperialism again. And Russia doesn’t want people to think that, Russia doesn’t need this. It just wants to go forward normally.”

And this new face of Eurasianism says he is not alone. Kofner tells the Minsk gathering that many of the EEU’s top technocrats have Eurasianist sympathies. And his Eurasianist Movement includes a cross-section of business-people, NGO staff and civil servants, as well as people working directly for the EEU.

“We have people wearing their insignia under their jackets,” Kofner says. “This is a long-term effort to promote ideologically patriotic Eurasianists, not oddballs but people who really want to make this happen.”

Eurasia may not be “cool” yet, but it still has plenty of life in it.

Illustrations by Aleksandra Krasutskaya

This piece is produced by Coda Network — a collaboration of independent newsrooms. Its partners include Coda Story, Ukrayinska Pravda, Spektr.Press, Kloop, Hetq and TOK.TV.

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Nominally one of Moscow’s closest allies, Belarus doesn’t regularly feature in Russian media. But since late 2016, a flurry of talk-shows and articles have addressed an alleged rise in Belarusian nationalism that, according to the coverage, if left unchecked by Moscow, could lead to a Maidan-style uprising in this NATO-border state.

Ultra-conservative, fringe sites sympathetic to the Kremlin account for much of this coverage, but more influential, government-run entities like the First Channel and Regnum news agency promote the claims, too.

The question is why.

Belarus is often referred to as Russia’s closest ally, but it is a purely transactional relationship, often described as “oil for kisses.” Generous subsidies for Russian energy imports and massive Russian loans have long propped up the Belarusian economy and, in exchange, Moscow gains the loyalty of a buffer-state between Russia and NATO.

Over the years, though, Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko has done his own thing. He did not endorse Russia’s takeover of Crimea or the Russia-aligned rebels in eastern Ukraine, and has made overtures to the Kremlin’s rivals when he doesn’t get his way — most recently, in backing “brotherly Ukraine” and a strong European Union while demanding lower prices for Russian gas supplies.

Lukashenko has long used such tactics, but the conflict in neighboring Ukraine and talk of a “new Cold War” have raised their risk dramatically.

In February, after Belarus announced plans for visa-free travel for short-term visitors from 80 countries, including EU members and the U.S., Russia promptly erected checkpoints for the first time along the countries’ shared border — a move which Lukashenko has warned could trigger a “serious conflict.” Already, Russia has deployed two mechanized military brigades close to the Belarusian border.

“Russia would like to turn Belarus into a military outpost, to put pressure on Ukraine and the EU,” comments Arseny Sivitsky, director and founder of the non-governmental Center for Strategic and Foreign Policy Studies. “We think that Belarus may be the next strategic surprise of Russia.”

Others don’t go so far. Security analyst Andrei Porotnikov, a former police investigator who now works for the Belarus Security Blog, sees a longer-term strategy against Lukashenko.

“They’re not trying to get rid of him, but to weaken him,” so that before the 2019 presidential elections “Lukashenko will go to them on his knees asking for money so as to retain his power,” he predicts.

In an ex-Soviet republic where Russian is still the lingua franca, state-controlled Russian TV is a powerful conduit for reaching either goal. Most Belarusians still get their news primarily from television. Rebroadcasts of government-run Russian channels account for four out of the nine TV channels available free-of-charge in Belarus.

The authorities in Minsk are well aware of Moscow’s ability to influence public opinion.

“A majority of Belorusians support Russia’s position on Ukraine, Donbass and Crimea. They believe that there are Nazis there [in Ukraine],” says Belarusian opposition politician Mikola Statkevich. “They support Russia because they watch Russian TV.”

Particularly during ongoing protests in Belarus against the president, that support could become critical.

But Minsk already has a counter-measure in place.

For years, the government-controlled Belarusian channels (Belarus RTR, NTV-Belarus, ONT, STV) which rebroadcast Russian TV programs have removed any controversial content about Belarusian politics before airing the shows.

On these hybrid channels, the evening news comes from Moscow first, Minsk second. The live Moscow broadcast starts a few minutes later in Belarus for on-the-spot censorship, according to Michal Janczuk, deputy chairperson of the Belarusian Association of Journalists. If a program contains something negative about Belarus, advertising takes the report’s place.

The Belarusian government began this practice as a way to counter any “negative information campaign against Belarus,” explains Dzianis Melyantsou, a senior analyst at the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies, a non-governmental think-tank in Minsk. “They are preparing the Russian population for the idea that there could be some kind of conflict with Belarus.”

Offending content, such as a 2010 NTV anti-Lukashenko documentary called “The Godfather,” may not air in Belarus, but the message for the Belarusian government is clear.

Belarusian channels do their best to air counter-propaganda about Russia. “Constantly on Belarusian TV, we have small pieces of information, negative information, about Russia. About their turmoil, about their corruption, about the oligarchs,” says Melyantsou.

The only channel considered to be an independent source of TV news in Belarus is the satellite channel Belsat TV, but it now faces an uncertain future. The channel is mostly funded by the Polish government as part of Warsaw’s broader democratic initiatives in Belarus, but Poland recently cancelled its contract with the channel; a move which may leave Belarus with no source of uncensored TV news.

But Melyantsou believes that Russia’s critical coverage of Belarus isn’t just intended for the Belarusian market.

“They are preparing the Russian population for the idea that there could be some kind of conflict with Belarus,” he claims. “Not on the scale of the Ukrainian conflict, but the Russian authorities are very angry about the Belarusian position towards Ukraine and the conflict in Donbass.”

Yet Lukashenko does not play a one-handed game. On March 21, amid reported energy talks with Russia, he charged that “Western foundations,” Western intelligence services and Belarusians who had “fled” the country are using the protests to stir up trouble in Belarus. Russian media nodded approvingly.

Lukashenko’s accusation, however, did not prevent him from publicly inviting NATO to observe joint military exercises with Russia, scheduled for this September.

“Lukashenko tries to make [President Vladimir] Putin nervous, and there is this kind of game [where he says] ‘I’m going, I’ll be gone for good!’ But where can he go? Who would support him?” asks politician Statkevitch.

Ultimately, analyst Porotnikov believes, Lukashenko himself is nervous. “Crimea showed that it is difficult to forecast what the Kremlin will do. It is not often rational...”

Meanwhile, with Belarusian media muddied by disinformation, analysts in Minsk are divided over how the situation with Russia will play out.

Belarusians “cannot understand the truth, this is impossible,” says analyst Melyantsou. “Here, there is propaganda from every direction...”

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As the elevator doors opened, plainclothes intelligence officers ambushed the journalists, demanding that they open the apartment door. The officers — agents of what is still known as the KGB, the Soviet-era name for Belarus’s secret services — forced one of the journalists, Michal Janczuk, to the ground, twisting his arm behind his back before ripping the keys from his hand. And once inside, the KGB men stripped the apartment of its camera and editing equipment. “They even took our forks,” recalls Sergei Kruchkou, the other journalist present that day. What neither Kruchkou nor Janczuk knew at the time was that the KGB were raiding the homes of dozens of Belsat’s reporters at the same time.

Janczuk and Kruchkou still work from the same apartment that the KGB raided nine years ago, and Belsat still faces constant harassment from authorities. But as Russian assertiveness roils Eastern Europe, the biggest threat to the channel’s future comes from the very state that has until now guaranteed its existence. The Polish government - on which the channel depends for most of its budget — is cancelling its contract with Belsat TV, in what is thought to be an effort to keep Belarus’ President, Alexander Lukashenko, on its side.

But here is the irony. The man called Europe’s last dictator has his own problems with Russia, especially with the impact of Moscow’s growing propaganda machine. And Belsat TV’s independent voice could help the Belarus government in countering it, according to Alesky Dzikawicki, the channel’s factual programming director. “In some ways, we are doing their job for them,” he says.

For almost 23 years, President Alexander Lukashenko has ruled Belarus with an iron grip. Much about the state resembles its Soviet past — even down to the persistence of collective farming. Dissent is scarcely tolerated and opposition politicians have been harassed or imprisoned or have disappeared altogether.

Since it was founded in 2007, Belsat TV has served as the only independent source of news in a country that the Committee to Protect Journalists has described as “one of the world’s most censored.” Through its satellite channel and online broadcasts, Belsat TV has lifted the lid on Belarus’s faltering economy and harassment of opposition politicians.

Denied accreditation by the Belarusian authorities, the network reports from Belarus but broadcasts from Warsaw — until now, they have technically been part of the Polish public broadcaster, Polish Television. Funding from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) accounts for about 80 percent of the channel’s $4.5 million annual budget. The man called Europe’s last dictator has his own problems with Russia, especially with the impact of Moscow’s growing propaganda machine. And Belsat TV’s independent voice could help the Belarus government in countering it.

Ties between Poland and Belarus go back centuries, but diplomatic relations have become strained since they pursued opposing paths following the collapse of communism. Unlike Belarus, Poland threw in its lot with the EU, free markets and democracy.

Support for Belsat TV formed part of Warsaw’s broader support for democratic initiatives in Belarus. But in January 2017, the MFA terminated its contract with the channel.

It is not clear why the funding came to such an abrupt end. When asked about it, a spokesperson for the Polish MFA said that it was “a good time to modernize Belsat TV,” and suggested that a future model for the channel could be to build on the channel’s online broadcasting.

Janczuk however believes that Belsat TV is being sacrificed by Poland in a bid to keep Belarus’s president Alexander Lukashenko on its side.

“They are in desperate need for a buffer zone, a grey zone between Russia and the European Union,” says Janczuk. “For Poland especially it’s quite valuable to have an additional 500 kilometer margin between them and Russian tanks.”

For years the EU had sought to isolate the Belarusian leadership through sanctions and travel bans, leaving the country highly economically dependent on Russia. But faced with a resurgent Russia, both Lukashenko and the European Union have begun to move away from their isolationist policies. European sanctions were dropped after the Belarusian President pardoned jailed opposition figures in 2016, and the presidential elections that year passed without much controversy. But beyond these gestures, Lukashenko shows no sign of pursuing meaningful democratic reforms.

Janczuk feels that Belsat has been betrayed by the rapprochement:

“All these ideals that we have been fighting for all these years have been sold by our European partners,” he says, staring down into the bottom of his empty coffee cup. “Nobody will die for Minsk.”

Alesky Dzikawicki, Belsat’s Warsaw-based factual programming director, strikes a more hopeful tone. He describes Poland’s decision to withdraw funding as a “mystery,” but believes that the Belarusian authorities might not necessarily want to see the channel closed.

Ironically, while the channel is critical of the Belarusian regime, it may help Lukashenko counter the bigger threat of Russian influence.

Like Poland, Belarus has been troubled by Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine. While the Belarussian economy is heavily dependent on trade and oil and gas subsidies from Russia, Lukashenko is now trying to keep the Kremlin at arms length as fears grow that Russia will look to increase its already considerable influence in the country.

But the prevalence of Russian speakers in Belarus and the availability of Russian TV stations there mean that Putin has a lot of tools to undermine Lukashenko. And this is where Belsat comes in, according to programming director Dzikawicki. “All these ideals that we have been fighting for all these years have been sold by our European partners,” he says, staring down into the bottom of his empty coffee cup. “Nobody will die for Minsk.”

“The Belarusian state media are perhaps aware that they should try to rebuff Russian propaganda, but they’re frightened to…But we show things the way they are, so in some ways, we are doing their job for them,” he says.

“And if the Russians ask them [the government] about us, they can just say, ‘well, it’s not us, they are in Warsaw, we can’t close them down’...So we are even useful to the Belarusian authorities,” he adds.

Moscow’s voice is certainly a force to contend with in Belarus. Of the basic package of nine TV channels available for free in Belarus, four of them are Russian-produced and people with satellite TV can access the full complement of Russia’s state-owned channels. Belarusian channels struggle to compete with the big budgets and high production values that make their Russian counterparts so popular.

Janczuk says that because of their popularity, certain Russian worldviews have taken root in Belarus. Belarusian TV channels are fairly neutral on the issue of Crimea, he explains. But 62 percent of Belarusians support the view that the annexation of Crimea was “an act of historical justice,” a view which has been vehemently promoted by Russian media.

“That means that Russian TV channels have more influence than Belarusian ones,” says Janczuk.

The Belsat TV team believe that this makes their work more important than ever, even as its funding falters.

“It is important to just have something there, so that people have the possibility of changing the channel,” says Sergei. “That there is something different there.”

But it means that Belsat TV now finds itself as both a pawn and a player in an increasingly complex information war for hearts and minds.

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