Since August 2020, political arrests in Belarus have taken place almost daily, but there have not been so many arrests in one week for almost a year. With the beginning of the war in Ukraine, people in Minsk and other cities took to the streets with the slogans “No to War” and “Glory to Ukraine!”. According to human rights activists, about a thousand of them were detained, most of them in detention centers. Journalist Maria Sysoy talked to some of them about how to protest in a country where arrests are threatened even for clothes of the wrong colors.

“When I went to the center, I was not scared, just such tension: if nothing happens, I will be sad, probably. And if something happens, it’s also sad, because many will be detained,” – says student Alona. I changed for the safety of the heroine).

On February 27, the fourth day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a referendum was held in Belarus to change the constitution, which includes zeroing the presidential term. Belarusians used the vote as an opportunity to gather for many small anti-war street rallies.

Recalling the mass protests after the 2020 presidential election, Alyona said of “Vietnamese flashbacks – in a good way”: “I think there were a lot of people, cars everywhere.”

According to the human rights center “Spring”, about 500 people were detained across the country that day.

Alona was detained the next day when she came to an announced rally on Privokzalna Square in Minsk. Almost no one was there: as it turned out, security forces blocked the entrance to the square in advance.

“On the 28th at Privokzalna Square, they did everything to prevent them from even gathering,” said another detainee, Natalia Dulina, a former associate professor at the Italian language department at Minsk State Linguistic University. She was released in the fall of 2020 after being arrested for campaigning against presidential election fraud, and she is one of the few who is willing to speak under her real name.

Like Alona, ​​Natallia was sentenced to 15 days in jail for participating in an anti-war rally, a standard term in such cases. According to her, some had to wait for the court for up to three days – and feeding, as a rule, begins only after the decision and official distribution to the detention center.

“At 10 o’clock in the morning we were taken out into the corridor, and my trial was at the end of the day,” says Alona. then they started shouting, “What are you sitting on! Get up! “There was no food, but there was water, and it was possible to get them to the toilet.”

Her trial lasted 10 minutes via Skype – directly from the pre-trial detention center. An anonymous witness to the accusation of balaclava quoted what was written in the protocol: “she was in the crowd … chanting” No to war! “… active participation.” Hiring a lawyer was pointless, says Alona.

Natalia Dulina was placed in the Minsk detention center on Okrestina Street, which is known worldwide for its brutal treatment of protesters after the 2020 elections.

“There were 17 of us in a double cell. The window does not open. You ask to open the window-feeder in the door – sometimes they open, sometimes – no. The stuffiness is terrible, such a murderer!”

Instead of a sink – a trash can, instead of a toilet – a hole in the floor, describes Natalia. The women had no bedding, no mattresses, no pillows.

“Burrows made of iron rods, and it is absolutely impossible to sleep there, only if something is very well laid. We originally had outerwear, but on March 8 they came and told everyone to hand over their jackets.”

According to Natalie, the lights were not turned off at night, and they were not even allowed to lie down during the day. We slept mostly on the floor.

“We tried to fit so that the whole body could fit. I slept on the side between the benches, there was about 1 meter by 50 cm. Like a pillow – a sweater sleeve, shoes. I heard that people slept on a loaf of bread, but there were cockroaches and woodlice, so we gave it up. ”

There were no walks, no soul, says Natalia. Instead, there were “cats” – homeless people with lice, who are often housed among “political” detainees.

We had a famous Alla Illivna, who was still laundered by Olya Khizhynkova (winner of the Miss Belarus 2008 contest, who was arrested for 42 days in 2020 for protests – MS). days detained in a cell with politicians, she is laundered, asked for a remedy for lice.

Of the hygienic means – at best a small piece of soap and toilet paper. One day we were left without toilet paper for a day and a half. A couple of days we could be without soap. The doctor gave us the pads. And they, too, were in short supply: eventually we began to say “no gaskets, there is only cotton wool.” She said that we are asking for too many pads: “I will take off my panties now and see who really needs them.”

Natalia remembers the standard day in the prison cell on Okrestina Street as follows: at 6 am they get up, then they bring bread. Breakfast – tea and porridge. Then a search: the detainees go out into the corridor, put their hands behind their backs, face the wall; roll call, check by metal detectors, search in the cell.

In their free time, girls and women played “Crocodile”, “Mafia”, some gave lectures on linguistics, and some talked about their master’s thesis in psychology. Natalia did exercises every day to reduce leg pain.

Lunch – compote or jelly, soup and porridge (rice, pearl barley, buckwheat), cutlet (meat, fish, liver), sometimes a piece of salted tomato or cucumber. Dinner at 18:00 – sausage or cutlet and porridge. Sometimes there was porridge three times a day. They drank water from the tap.

At the 22nd stop, and at 2 and 4 o’clock in the morning they wake up for a roll call.

Instead of toilet paper – newspapers from Tikhanovskaya

Olena, who was detained in Zhodino, has similar memories of 15 days in jail: iron bunks without bedding, no walks or transfers. There were 32 people in the 10-bed cell.

At first, only household soap was in the cell. Then one girl was hospitalized with nephritis, where she was given shampoo and wipes. Alyona refused to go to the shower when the other girls said that they gave 10-15 minutes to 25 people.

Very strong physical discomfort, to put it mildly. But this is the only thing that was difficult, because I am not very touched by all these methods of moral oppression, and there were many good people around, all very educated. and the oldest women in our cell were 50 years old – 18 and 67 “.

Entrepreneur Petro (name changed) also met good people – lawyers, programmers, businessmen – in the Zhodino detention center. At the beginning of the war, he wrote in a telegram chat that the war in Ukraine was terrible and that it was impossible to remain silent and not act. They came for him the same day. He was anonymous in the chat, and he did not know how he was identified.

“They detained me with handcuffs, pulled my hat over my face, everything was in a rough shape. They beat me a little, not hard,” he said. Then they took him home for a search: they searched the contents of his phone and computer, but, according to Peter, they found nothing.

Forced video recording has been a standard practice of security forces since 2020: detainees are urged not to protest and not to read banned telegram channels. “I knew there was no point in giving up. Those who refused were beaten: one guy had blue legs, he was standing because he couldn’t lie down and sit. I decided to skip this step.”

The conditions of detention described by Peter are similar to the stories of Elena and Natalia – only his mattresses and pillows were worn out, and his food is a little better than in Minsk. 24 people were placed in a 6-bed cell.

According to Natalie, there were women deprived of parental rights with her in the cell – they were allowed to have personal belongings and hygiene items. Peter speaks about the same “sorting” – “non-political” issue, for example, bed linen. With the so-called “controlled” the opposite.

One person drowned soap in the toilet, and we were not given more soap. There was no toilet paper. At the request to give us toilet paper, they gave us a newspaper with a pre-election speech by Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, with her portrait. that there were other newspapers. ”

Peter recalls that on March 4, the day of the police, the guards conducted a search with special zeal: they beat the detainees on the legs. “But at night it was just an atrocity. I was lucky to go out during the day, but the guys then said that drunken guards broke into the cell, beat people, took them to the shower and beat them too. At night there was hell. Talk to them in vain. You immediately you get handed out if you try to talk to them, to object. ”

Alona also speaks about violence – according to her, the SIZO staff drank at night, turned on the music, and then went to the cameras and mocked the detainees – women verbally and men physically.

Natalia also talks about insults and threats, and once, according to her, a woman complained of a headache: a security guard took her out of the cell and hit her head against the wall.

“All this is real torture. What is torture is such treatment of a person that causes moral and physical suffering and humiliation,” says Natalia. to go out and be there. It works. We see that people are intimidated. And people know that in two minutes (after going to the rally) they will be taken. ”

Until the riot police marched on us, we were able to show our protest for five minutes, shout “No to war!” And “Glory to Ukraine!” – Natalia recalls the rally on February 27 and explains that everything happened only because the place and the time was announced at the last minute. “It is obvious to me that we have no chance of getting together now.”

Mass street protests caused by disagreement with the results of the presidential election lasted from August to December 2020. According to some estimates, more than 200,000 people took part in them at the peak. But at the beginning of 2021, street protest activity was suppressed.

According to the Vesna human rights center, in 2020 alone, more than 33,000 protesters were subjected to administrative arrests or fines. International organizations, including the United Nations, noted that some detainees had been tortured and raped. Opposition leaders, activists and bloggers have been sentenced to long terms or have left the country, with more than 1,100 people considered political prisoners by April 2022.

“We live in a concentration camp. Our state is a watchdog over us,” Natalia continues. that it won’t change anything in principle. ”

“The protest didn’t go anywhere, as I see it,” Peter said. you get into the meat grinder of repression. When we had a chance in 2020, there was no support from Europe and the same Ukraine. We let in, we continued to trade. ”

Western sanctions imposed in response to repression in Belarus have intensified relatively slowly. The European Union and the United States began with personal sanctions against officials, and only in the summer of 2021, after the forced landing of a Ryanair plane in Minsk with opposition leader Roman Protasevich on board, imposed economic restrictions, but also with many caveats.

Western companies are also reluctant to leave the Belarusian market – the massive result came only in 2022, when Belarus found itself in international isolation with Russia, which launched a war on February 24 against Ukraine.

“We are infinitely ashamed that Russia attacked Ukraine through our territory,” says Natalia.

Officially, Belarus does not take part in the war, but it was through its territory that the Russian offensive against Kyiv and other cities in northern Ukraine took place.

Independent opinion polls are banned in Belarus, so it is impossible to truly assess the level of popular support for the war. In March, the British think tank Chatham House conducted an online survey. They noted that Lukashenko’s supporters are less active on the Internet, and those who hold opposition views are often afraid to speak out on the Internet, even anonymously.

But the results of the poll showed that only 3% of respondents want to take part in hostilities on Russia’s side, while 28% support Moscow but do not want to go to war. More than half of those polled opposed Russia using Belarus as a springboard to attack Ukraine.

Dozens of Belarusians have been arrested for trying to damage railway infrastructure, with the media calling them “rail guerrillas” trying to disrupt the transportation of Russian military cargo.

“We are very supportive of Ukraine, a lot depends on it,” Petro said.

According to Vesna estimates, at least 1,500 people have been detained since the Russian invasion of Ukraine over anti-war protests in Belarus. Yellow and blue were added to the forbidden combination of white and red. Belarusians are detained for flowers, ribbons and clothes with the colors of the national flag of Belarus, which has become a symbol of opposition, or the colors of the Ukrainian state flag.

“One drunken man was unlucky,” Peter recalls of other detainees for the protests. “He shouted on the bus, ‘I love you, Minsk!’ days for being drunk and 15 days for “Long live Belarus!”

“People came to the eternal fire – 15 days. A businessman who prints postcards – 15 days. He never printed anything political, but came to him with a search. They found nothing, but gave 15 days. We have no laws.”

More than 480 websites, including independent media outlets, and 400 telegram channels and groups have been blocked in Belarus. Many of them have been declared extremist.

Amnesty International estimates that about 270 NGOs have been liquidated. Fearing arrests for reposts and even subscriptions to these telegram channels, more and more Belarusians are reading them without a subscription, and have even become accustomed to regularly cleaning up personal correspondence.

“Most Ukrainians don’t understand the situation of Belarusians since 2020. They don’t understand how tough we are here,” says Olena. “Look at how the Russian military is dispersing peaceful demonstrations in occupied cities. the same methods that the Belarusian security forces used against our citizens. ”

I have not felt safe in Minsk since 2020, and it is getting worse. We recently went on a tour of the city center, there were 15-20 of us. I was scared to be in such a “crowd”. When I hear loud noises and see police, I’m starting to twitch a little. ”

After the arrest, Natalya was acquainted with a document stating that the third detention could result in a criminal case.

The police, a psychologist from the kindergarten and the guardianship service came to Peter’s house: they inspected the apartment, the refrigerator, the children’s room. The family was put under control – this means that children can be sent to orphanages.

Peter says he is thinking of leaving the country and will definitely leave if Belarus officially enters the war. Elena and Natalia are going to stay.

“Some people dream that they are in the cell again. Some people are scared to walk on their cheeks,” says Natalia. “I don’t have that. I understand that something can happen at any moment, but you can’t live and think about it all the time.”

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