📩 Trapped in Belarus

DEAR READER,

Sweeping reciprocal tariffs have sent global markets in a nosedive, and Central and Eastern Europe is not an exception. The Warsaw Stock Exchange’s WIG20 index fell 7% after Friday's close, with over 85% of the companies in red. Still, PM Donald Tusk insists that Poland will calmly endure. Meanwhile, the Balkans are bracing for impact too, with Serbia hit by a 37% tariff, Bosnia and Herzegovina 35%, and North Macedonia 33%. Albania, Montenegro, and Kosovo face the baseline 10%. We will be tracking how the region responds to the tariffs in the coming weeks.

That aside, in this week's expert opinion we are having a closer look at Belarus and its crackdown on foreign nationals. While most headlines usually focus on Russia, we asked Darya Grishchuk, a Belarusian journalist based here in Kraków to shed light on what's happening behind bars in Belarus.

Enjoy reading this week’s “brief”!

— Giorgi Beroshvili, Editor

In January 2025, Anastasia Nuhfer, a US citizen of Belarusian descent, was released from a Belarusian prison. She had spent nearly a year behind bars, with her arrest reportedly linked to the political protests in the country in 2020. Anastasia was one of dozens of foreign nationals prosecuted in Belarus on protest-related charges. Today, other US citizens remain in detention, along with nationals from other countries.

In his drive to silence any criticism of the de facto ruling regime in Belarus, Alyaksandr Lukashenka has not stopped at repressing his own citizens. In the five years since the mass protests of 2020, dozens of foreign nationals have faced trial in the country. They have been accused of forming extremist groups, terrorism, espionage and working as foreign agents. These charges carry long prison sentences in Belarus, and those labelled as terrorists face the death penalty.

“Unfortunately, the Lukashenka regime continues to use execution as a form of punishment. In a civilized society, such treatment of human life is unacceptable. However, as we can see, this system places no value on human life whatsoever,” Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya commented on the news of the German citizen Rico Krieger’s death sentence in summer 2024.

It was terrorism charges that the German faced – a case which drew international attention. Krieger was found guilty of carrying out an explosion in October 2023 at a railway station on the outskirts of Minsk, a transit point for military cargo. No one was injured, the damage amounted to just over 500 US dollars. Nevertheless, Krieger was sentenced to death. Fortunately, he managed to escape punishment, he was ultimately included in a large prisoner exchange between Russia and the West.

The Belarusian regime does not spare even the citizens of its closest political ally – Russia. Though in this case, it might actually be doing Moscow a favour. One of those convicted under “terrorism charges” is Alexey Kulikov, who was arrested in Hrodna, a regional centre in western Belarus. He had fled to the neighbouring country to escape mobilization in Russia.

Now, Kulikov is serving a 23-year sentence under two criminal code articles: “Act of Terrorism” and “Act of International Terrorism.” The Belarusian KGB accused him of filming military facilities with the intent to pass the footage to Ukrainian intelligence.

A Japanese citizen, Nakanishi Masatoshi, was also accused of alleged ties to the Ukrainian military. He was sentenced to seven years in a penal colony on charges of espionage. “The court found the defendant guilty of cooperating with a foreign intelligence service, security agency, and espionage organization, engaging in actions knowingly aimed at harming Belarus’s national security,” the Prosecutor General’s Office stated.

The arrest of Masatoshi became public in the fall of 2024. State television aired a “special report” that “exposed” his alleged espionage activities. He was accused of gathering information on Belarus’s socio-political situation and China’s Belt and Road Initiative, as well as filming military infrastructure and “events unfolding on the Belarus-Ukraine border”.

Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, 19 foreign nationals have been arrested in Belarus on charges of espionage. They were collectively sentenced to 135 years in prison. These trials are typically held behind closed doors and human rights activists are often unable to find out the exact nature of the charges against the foreigners. However, pro-government television reports often reveal that the reason for the arrests is linked to connections with western and Ukrainian intelligence services.

For the same “offense”, in the spring of 2022, Latvian citizen Alla Sokolienko was arrested. In a propaganda film by the media holding company Belteleradiocompany, titled Counterintelligence: Belarusian KGB Operations Against Western and Ukrainian Intelligence Services, it was later explained that “Sokolienko, on the orders of Latvian intelligence, was recruiting Belarusian soldiers, gathering information, and creating compromising situations that would later serve as the basis for recruiting foreigners”.

The Belarusian regime started imprisoning unwanted foreign nationals even before the full-scale invasion. Since the 2020 protests, at least 75 foreign nationals have faced political persecution, according to the human rights centre Viasna. Belarusian-Polish journalist Andrzej Poczobut has been behind bars for four years. He was arrested in March 2021 and in May 2023, he began serving an eight-year sentence.

The charges against the journalist state that Poczobut referred to the Soviet Union's invasion of Poland in 1939 as an act of aggression in the media. He was also accused of making statements in defence of the Polish minority in Belarus, writing articles for Gazeta Wyborcza about the Belarusian protests in 2020, and a 2006 piece in Magazyn Polski about Anatol Radzivonik, one of the commanders of the Polish anti-communist underground in the Hrodna region. It is also known that in the fall of 2021, Poczobut refused to write a petition for a pardon addressed to Lukashenka.

“The Polish government is indeed working hard and taking all possible diplomatic steps to help free Andrzej Poczobut. I don’t want to say at what stage this is, but our diplomats are working every day, discussing the situation with representatives from various countries, so that Andrzej Poczobut can regain his freedom,” said Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska, the Marshal of the Polish Senate, during a solidarity event in Białystok, Poland.

Today, 36 foreign nationals are held in Belarusian prisons. They are from Japan, Poland, Sweden, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Uzbekistan, Sweden and Armenia. In total, more than 1,200 people are behind bars for opposing Lukashenka's regime.

— Darya Grishchuk, Belarusian journalist based in Kraków, Poland