Four years have passed since the rigged 9 August 2020 presidential election in Belarus. Ordinary people are labelled traitors and extremists while Moscow is taking over more of Belarus’s sovereignty.
Slim signs, no significant change
In the past few weeks, minor positive signals have come out of Minsk but they are largely cosmetic. A dozen Belarus political prisoners were released on pardon, while five Ukrainian citizens and one German citizen in Belarusian prisons were exchanged. Belarus introduced a visa-free regime for EU citizens which was lauded by state propaganda as an unprecedented, gracious sign of the country’s ‘openness’. Meanwhile, some EU Member States advise against travelling to Belarus due to the high risk of fabricated criminal prosecution by the Belarus authorities. Tension on the Belarus-Ukraine border somewhat decreased as the Belarusian side publicly ordered the removal of sizeable military units from the border area. In the large international prisoner/hostage swap on 1 August, German national Rico Krieger was in the group of the exchanged. He was recently sentenced to death in Belarus for ‘terrorism’ and ‘mercenary activity’ in an odd and inconsistent criminal case. It seems more correct to say that he was taken hostage by the Lukashenka regime.
But these developments stand out against a continuing, highly negative background in Belarus. Around 1,400 people recognised as political prisoners, including Noble Prize laureate Ales Bialatski, continue serving prison terms, often in exceptionally hard and inhuman conditions. Many prominent political prisoners have been kept incommunicado for more than a year.
Strategically, Belarus-Ukraine relations have lately not improved given that the political and military partnership between Russia and the Lukashenka regime remains in place and the scope of their collaboration and coordination seems to be widening.
Domestically, observers have not noticed any milder treatment of political opponents or changes in rhetoric. Political opponents are continuously proclaimed ‘traitors’, detained people are forced to record ‘repentance’ videos, and ‘extremist’ lists of individuals and organisations continue expanding as fast as a year or two ago.
In July, Belarusian state propaganda celebrated the 30th anniversary of Alyaksandr Lukashenka coming to power. The celebration was reminiscent of Soviet days, with proposals to declare him a Hero of Belarus in a style close to Joseph Stalin’s designation as the father of the Soviet people. Lately, more signs have indicated that Lukashenka is preparing to take part personally in the presidential ‘election’ scheduled for 2025. The regime seems determined to scare and intimidate would-be protests with its current actions.
Deterring the opposition – forced confessions and the hunt for traitors
Things were very far from perfect before 2020. The state still ruled with authoritarian repression. During the four years since August 2020, however, the domestic political environment has hardened considerably. The large demonstrations in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary Belarusians gathered to protest against the stolen elections in the summer of 2020 did scare Lukashenka. Just remember the pictures of a desperate Lukashenka running around with his personal submachine gun and jumping in and out of helicopters taking him around in Minsk. Lukashenka’s answer has been even harder repression as we have documented earlier.
Turning to Belarusian dissidents and activists in post-2020 Belarus, the state media has turned up campaigns to intimidate and demoralise them. Outlets use a lot of toxic and dehumanising rhetoric, which we have discussed in more detail here and here.
The forced interviews and repentance videos
Forced interviews and ‘repentance’ videos have become an element and often a condition for pardon and release from detention. To the untrained eye it could look like the opposition members had been turned around becoming real regime loyalists. Among their first victims was blogger Raman Pratasevich, captured on 23 May 2021 following the forced diversion of a RyanAir flight from Athens to Vilnius to Minsk airport. The Belarusian regime attempted to promote his forced confession thanks to paid advertisements on YouTube. In 2023, even Raman Pratasevich’s mother, Natallia, was used in the state propaganda campaign which targeted Belarusians abroad and called on them to return to Belarus. Placed on a cosy park bench in Minsk next to her son, Natallia said she missed her relatives and called Belarus a free country.
One of the most recent ‘confession’ cases is a video released on a regime-controlled Telegram channel. A woman belonging to the Belarusian diaspora in the US is forced to say that she used to administer a diaspora social media account and that she called on others to ‘finance terrorists’. We do not want to promote the spreading of these videos and will not link to them.
The case of Rico Krieger, mentioned above, is also notable in this regard. In July, Belarusian state TV released Krieger’s staged interview where he called on German authorities to help him ‘before it is too late’. Belarus state propaganda stressed that Lukashenka was the only person in the world who could save Krieger’s life. Days after the staged interview, Krieger was indeed pardoned by him.
From political opponent to becoming a ‘traitor’, an ‘extremist’, or a ‘terrorist’
The portrayal of political opponents as traitors, an old Soviet tradition, took a new turn in post-2020 Belarus. 18-year-old Stanislau Shapel is now on trial. He faces a prison term of up to 15 years for treason. His prosecution follows from a propaganda movie which featured other stories of Belarusian minors whom the filmmakers accused of preparing acts of sabotage and terrorist acts. Allegedly, the teenager got in touch with an unknown individual online who proposed employment in exchange for recording a video in support of Ukraine.
As of February 2024, 45 people had been sentenced in Belarus based on ‘Treason against the State’, or Article 356 of the updated version of a criminal code that was inherited from Soviet times. Around the same number of people have been convicted in absentia on similar charges.
‘Traitors’ include journalists, trade union activists, and cultural workers. One is cultural worker Pavel Belavus, imprisoned for 13 years in 2022. His sentence followed from an official investigation report alleging that he, ‘under the guise of cultural and historical development, was spreading the ideas of Belarusian nationalism on various public social networks and websites, the purpose of which was to change state power in Belarus’. Allegedly, Belavus also ‘stimulated the hostility of his compatriots towards the Motherland’.
Is ‘extremism’ really on the rise?
Minsk and Moscow seem to give each other mutual inspiration in methods of oppressing political dissent. The similar trends in Belarus and Russia of spiking numbers of treason and espionage cases come as no surprise. Human rights activists argue that Russia often uses anti-terrorism and anti-extremism laws, vague in their wording and arbitrary in their application, to silence domestic opponents. Similarly, around 450 Belarusians, including key pro-democracy figures such as Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, many journalists, and even musicians, have been added to the terrorist list in Belarus. What in other countries is considered ordinary political activity and the expression of one’s convictions can easily result in a terrorism label in today’s Belarus.
The extrajudicial ‘extremist’ list run by the Belarusian Ministry of the Interior currently has about 4,200 names on it, among them a dozen journalists and bloggers. We pause for a second to repeat: 4,200. The figure itself is the real extreme.
The youngest was 16 years of age during the 2020 protests, and the oldest ‘extremist’, sentenced for ‘insulting the president’, is now 82. Sometimes it only took some negative commentary online about state officials to face criminal charges and a nomination to the ‘extremist’ list.
Furthermore, the list of ‘extremist’ organisations consists of over 220 items, mostly non-governmental organisations, professional unions, groups on social media, and media outlets such as Deutsche Welle and Radio Liberty. Thousands of additional media outlets and social media accounts are on the ‘extremist’ list run by the Ministry of Information.
Our more detailed repression timeline against Belarusian media and media workers is available here, here, and here.
Depending on Russia
Belarus’s heavy economic and political dependence on Russia, already the case by 2020, has taken much uglier forms since then. Belarus’s media agenda was immediately aligned with Russia’s and the Kremlin’s encroachment on the country’s autonomy in many spheres has significantly progressed, even in international forums. Statements by Belarusian diplomats in the OSCE and UN have mirrored those of Russia, and the two MFAs recently issued a joint report on human rights in the world.
The 2022 constitutional amendments renounced Belarus’s non-nuclear and neutral status, making the country a tool for Russia’s fearmongering with nuclear threats. The Belarusian armed forces collaborate closely with Russia. They allow Russian forces to use Belarus territory, airspace, rear logistic support, and medical facilities in their armed aggression against Ukraine. Airspace defence has since long been fully integrated between Belarus and Russia.
Youth indoctrination
Like in Russia, in Belarus the indoctrination of youth with pro-Soviet and pro-Russian propaganda has greatly accelerated. This includes patriotic camps, mandatory special lessons in schools on ideology, the production of patriotic movies, and forcing people – especially those in state institutions – to watch these movies in cinemas. See more details here and here.
Denouncing Russian tsarism equals extremism
Perhaps the 2023 Belarusian court’s decision to ban the poems of the 19th century Belarusian writer Vintsent Dunin-Martsinkevich can be treated as the epitome of the current status of Belarus’s sovereignty. The poems, written in the Belarusian language in the 1860s and calling on the Belarusian people not to trust the tsarist Russian empire, were infamously blacklisted for ‘extremism’.
Another Belarus worth celebrating
9 August is an occasion to recall that there is another Belarus, different from Lukashenka’s regime. Brave civil society activists, independent journalists, and human rights defenders continue to report on life in Belarus and develop links to the outside world. That Belarus is worth celebrating.
See the blogpost of EU High Representative Josep Borrell titled “The EU continues to stand for a free and democratic Belarus” (in Belarusian) (in Russian) and his statement on the 4th anniversary of the fraudulent presidential elections.
Article and pictures first time published on the EUvsDisinfo web page. Prepared for publication by volunteers from the Res Publica - The Center for Civil Resistance.
