Toxic regime: ‘More than ever Belarus feels like a nation now’

When Belarusian police raided the media organisation where Anton Ruliou worked and arrested several of his colleagues, he realised the time had come to flee his homeland.

Fearful of being tracked by the country's KGB security service, Ruliou and his girlfriend left their mobile phones in their Minsk apartment last December and went east, knowing that Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko had all but sealed the western borders with the European Union as he sought to crush a pro-democracy uprising.

But Russia was also dangerous territory, given the Kremlin's support for Lukashenko's crackdown on opponents who it portrayed as puppets of a hostile West, and all the main roads leading to Moscow were tightly guarded at the Belarusian frontier.

“A friend helped us find a minibus that was going to Moscow by village roads, using a border crossing that was not controlled by guards,” Ruliou (32) recalls.

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“It was winter, very cold and in lots of places there were no roads at all. The highway from Minsk to Moscow is good and the journey usually takes about seven hours. But this time, going this way, it took us 25 hours to get there.”

They had escaped Belarus – where several people had been killed, hundreds injured and 35,000 arrested in the four months since huge protests had erupted against Lukashenko – but would not be safe until they reached the European Union.

Only after flying from Moscow to the Russian region of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, then taking a car to the frontier with Lithuania and persuading its border guards to let them in, did Ruliou feel they were beyond Lukashenko's reach.

Hundreds of Lukashenko’s critics have left Belarus during a drive to quell dissent that has moved from an initial phase of intense police violence to today’s relentless, grinding pressure on civil society, as his regime shuts down non-government organisations (NGOs) and independent media, and arrests and imprisons their staff.

But not all of those who fled managed to escape Lukashenko’s grasp.

Fear of retribution from Lukashenko's regime even reached the Belarusian Olympic squad in Tokyo

In May, journalist and opposition activist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega were flying from Greece to Lithuania with Ryanair, when Belarusian air-traffic control told the plane to land at Minsk airport due to a supposed bomb warning.

The threat was a hoax, but the couple were arrested on the tarmac and later paraded on Belarusian state television, where they made “confessions” to various crimes that relatives and colleagues said were clearly scripted and forced.

Opposition groups also see Lukashenko's hand behind the death in Kiev this week of Vitaly Shishov, who led an organisation to help Belarusians who left their homeland for Ukraine; he was found hanged in a park after vanishing while out for a jog, and police have launched a murder investigation.

Fear of retribution from Lukashenko's regime even reached the Belarusian Olympic squad in Tokyo, where sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya refused to go home due to fears for her safety after being expelled from the team by sports officials whose work she criticised. She is now in Poland, which has offered her asylum.

Ruliou (32) says he feels safe in Warsaw, where he is part of a burgeoning Belarusian community and has resumed work for Press Club Belarus and the Belarus in Focus information office, which now operate in exile in the Polish capital alongside many of his country's other independent media outlets and NGOs.

Before her recent visit to Ireland, Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya – who fled to Lithuania last August to escape threats from the Minsk regime – said security concerns were ever-present.

“We know we are targets of the regime, me and all of my team and all those activists who have relocated from Belarus,” she told The Irish Times. “We have to be very careful and to know where to go if we feel we are being followed. The nearer you are to Belarus, the closer are the hands of the regime – there are KGB officers in Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine.”

Tikhanovskaya said she had not felt safe “since the day I gave my documents to the election commission last year” to register as a candidate in presidential elections in place of her husband Sergei, a businessman and popular opposition blogger who was jailed to stop him running against Lukashenko.

The former interpreter and secretary says she had no interest in politics and was quite happy raising her two children until Sergei was arrested, when her sense of injustice spurred her to enter the election race.

Joining forces with Maria Kolesnikova, campaign manager for another jailed opposition candidate, and Veronika Tsepkalo, whose husband was barred from the election, Tikhanovskaya blazed a campaign trail that electrified Belarus.

Thousands went out to hear the women speak in town squares, and their bright, open and approachable manner was a world away from the Soviet-style bombast of Lukashenko, a former collective farm boss who has ruled the country since 1994.

"It was astonishing – as a Belarusian and as a woman – to suddenly associate yourself with politicians who represent you," says Tania Reut (33), a Belarusian journalist now living in Dublin after working in Poland and Switzerland.

“You see Maria Kolesnikova, who studied and worked in Germany, and Svetlana too, and we see our own lives reflected...There was a feeling that this is our time. Belarusian politics was so stuffy – and these three women brought fresh air.”

After using the legal system to sideline the men who were expected to be his main election challengers, and having quashed or outlasted opposition protests during previous elections, Lukashenko simply disregarded the three women.

“Our constitution is not for women. Our society has not matured enough to vote for a woman. This is because by the constitution the president handles a lot of power,” he thundered during a campaign speech at a tractor factory in Minsk.

Later, when trying to justify himself, he seemed to only confirm his prejudice.

“What I meant is that our constitution is such that it is hard even for a man to carry this burden,” he explained. “If this burden is placed on a woman, she will collapse, poor thing. This is what I meant, not because I do not respect women.”

Lukashenko’s arrogance came back to haunt him. When he claimed to have won 80 per cent of votes in a blatantly rigged election, hundreds of thousands of Belarusians rallied to demand his resignation, in an unprecedented show of support for Tikhanovskaya and her female-led team.

Women were at the forefront of protests that continued for weeks, and when Tikhanovskaya escaped to Lithuania, Kolesnikova stepped forward as a charismatic protest leader, even ripping up her passport at the Ukrainian border to thwart a KGB bid to deport her.

Belarusian women also suffered during an increasingly brutal crackdown, enduring violent treatment and threats of rape from police officers who severely beat and tortured hundreds of male detainees, according to human rights groups.

Their strong presence in Belarus’s NGOs and media community means many women have been jailed in recent months, including the founder of Press Club Belarus, Yulia Slutskaya, who has been in jail for eight months facing tax evasion charges; the club was officially dissolved by the Minsk regime last month.

Kolesnikova went on trial in a closed court this week, and faces up to 12 years in jail if convicted of extremism, plotting to seize power and threatening national security; yet she smiled and danced in the dock and vowed never to give in.

“I knew that staying in Belarus after August 9th [election day] would not be easy or simple, but I was ready for that,” she told Russia’s TV Rain before the trial.

'We surprised ourselves at how much we can do together and how much of a nation we are when we want to be'

“And on September 7th [when she was arrested] I wasn’t even sure that I would survive, and that it wasn’t the last Monday of my life. A year later, I’m alive – and that can only make me happy.” Kolesnikova said.

Reut has watched “waves of horror” convulse her homeland, where rights groups say more than 600 political prisoners are now behind bars. But she also believes that this ordeal was “when Belarusians all over the world and at home clicked as a nation...and now we are connected and doing things together. This was a very special year in this sense.”

“We surprised ourselves at how much we can do together and how much of a nation we are when we want to be,” she says, describing how Belarusians crowdfunded to help people who lost their jobs or were fined for political reasons, and to buy masks for medics fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

On her last visit home, Reut sensed that something fundamental had changed in Belarus.

“When protesting in 2006 or 2010, you felt there was a [politically active] community, but it was a community in a bigger place, which was Belarus. When I came to Minsk last October I felt that the whole of Belarus is now this community,” she says.

“You see it in small details, like flags in windows... and you’d see someone who you’d think might work for the government, and then they’d get off the tram with you and go to the protest – and the whole tram gets out and goes to the protest. That’s quite an incredible feeling, that feeling of togetherness.”

The scale and severity of Lukashenko’s crackdown has cleared protesters off the streets, but Reut thinks Belarusians’ desire for change is still quietly burning.

Ruliou is adamant that “he is not waiting 10 years or even five years to go home.” The regime is now so “toxic”, he believes, that its end must be near.

“The events of August 2020 and afterwards united people, and more than ever Belarus feels like a nation now,” he says. “This is a positive thing that came out of all this – and you cannot destroy this idea with repression.”