and human rights. I rode with the dep-
uty chairman, Valentin Stefanovich, as
he went to meet a man whose brother
had been killed in police custody. Four
Viasna activists were already in prison,
and Stefanovich was anticipating a full-
scale crackdown. “I think they intend
to clean the country of all independent
media and civil-society groups,” he said.
As we drove, Stefanovich detailed
the government’s recent actions—six
hundred political prisoners detained,
hundreds of people beaten or tortured
in custody, thousands fired from their
jobs. “Survival is the most important
thing for Lukashenka,” Stefanovich said,
“because he can’t imagine his life with-
out power.”
Evidence suggested that political pris-
oners were being widely mistreated.
“This whole year, they’ve been trying
to make me regret what I did,” Maria
Kalesnikava, the campaign manager,
wrote to the BBC from her cell. “I’ve
been in hot and then cold cells, with-
out air or light, without people. A whole
year with nothing.”
With the protests suppressed, Lu-
kashenka moved to expunge any trace
of dissent; he even purged school cur-
ricula of books by Aleksandr Solzhenit-
syn and by Svetlana Alexievich, the
Nobel Prize-winning author who was
one of the revolt’s leaders until she fled
the country, last year. In May, Luka-
shenka ordered a fighter jet to force
down a Ryanair passenger plane, in order
to arrest a journalist named Raman
Pratasevich and his girlfriend. Pratase-
vich was beaten in jail and forced to
confess in a surreal televised interview.
Lukashenka also launched a cam-
paign against opponents outside the
country. One tactic was to use Interpol,
the international police agency, to gather
intelligence on dissidents living in exile
and to issue arrest warrants on trumped-
up charges. European governments
picked up at least two such people, but
released them once they realized the
mistake. Lithuanian officials told me
that they were worried about Tsikhanou-
skaya’s security; the location of her home
was a secret, and not even her closest
aides had been there. In August, a Be-
larusian activist helping dissidents flee
the country was found hanging from a
tree in Kyiv.
In July, just after I left Belarus, secu-
rity forces embarked on a nationwide
crackdown of civil society, closing fifty
N.G.O.s in a single day—ranging from
groups trying to protect human rights
to organizations helping the disabled.
Police arrested several people I had in-
terviewed, including Stefanovich, Vias-
na’s deputy chairman. In the past, Be-
larusian dissidents were usually released
after a few days or weeks, but this time
was different; family members were not
allowed to visit detainees, and were given
no information about charges against
them. Stefanovich’s wife took her chil-
dren to Georgia. “We are thinking it
will be a long time,” she told me.W
hen the European Union stiff-
ened economic sanctions, Lu-
kashenka gave a rambling hour-long
speech, in which he accused the West
of conspiring to topple his government.
“Look at the unprecedented pressure
on the country today, how they want
to aggressively teach us a lesson, put us
in our place, provoke us using the dirt-
iest methods and techniques. All this
escalation, impotent rage, and envy arise
from their failure to stage an insurrec-tion and coup d’état in Belarus,” he said.
Cut off from the E.U., Lukashenka
worked to strengthen his ties to Rus-
sia. In September, he and Putin met
for the sixth time in a year; Putin an-
nounced that he would lend Belarus
six hundred million dollars, promised
to maintain the flow of cheap natural
gas, and said that the two countries had
agreed to more closely align their tax
and legal systems.
When reporters for Belarusian state-
media outlets began resigning, Russian
journalists arrived to replace them. In
September, the two countries under-
took a military exercise that involved
two hundred thousand troops; the
armies simulated a NATO invasion and
a Russian-led response. The Russian
military opened two joint training cen-
ters in Belarus, putting Lukashenka’s
security forces increasingly under Rus-
sian control. “Lukashenka knows he is
a hostage,” Latushka, the former min-
ister, said.
Many Belarusians worried that Putin
had his eyes on valuable state-owned
assets, including oil refineries and pot-
ash-processing plants, which Russian