“Citizens wore red and white, the colors of the Pahonia, the traditional flag of Belarus, a symbol made illegal in 1995 shortly after President Aliaksandr Lukashenka came to power.”
onia was a kindergarten teacher when the revolution started. It was May of 2020, and he was 27. After the presidential election was called and the Belarusian KGB arrested opposition leader Sergei Tikhanovsky, numberless citizens took to the streets, and Sonia was one of them. All that summer he went to the rallies in Minsk, always pushing to the frontline of the demonstration, pushing so far forward that he could not know if he was protected by the relative safety of the crowd, or if he would be dragged away by the OMON, the brutal crowd control troops of the Ministry of the Interior. He had never been political before, but now he truly understood the corrupted country his generation was inheriting. He had been called.
On the morning of August 9th, election day, Sonia and his parents walked to School No. 180 where they stood in line to vote. Bluetooth speakers blared protest songs into the streets from the windows of Soviet apartment blocks. Citizens wore red and white, the colors of the Pahonia, the traditional flag of Belarus, a symbol made illegal in 1995 shortly after President Aliaksandr Lukashenka came to power. The voter in front of Sonia wore a Pahonia COVID mask, defiance strapped across his face.
Sonia ticked the box next to the name of Sviatlana Tikhanovskaya, the woman running as the opposition candidate in place of her imprisoned husband. Like most other voters, Sonia and his parents each took a picture of their completed ballot and immediately posted it on Telegram, the one part of the internet the KGB had not managed to block on election day. By lunchtime, voters were being arrested for photographing their ballots.
By dinnertime, state-run media announced that exit polls showed Lukashenka, a man who calls himself “Europe’s last dictator,” had won his sixth term with over 80% of the vote. It was also announced that the official results would not be released until the next day, a direct violation of the country’s constitutional requirement to post the results on the day of the election, a law meant to prevent tampering with the ballots.
Not being reported were the protests erupting across the country, especially in Minsk. Sonia checked Telegram. The largest rally was at the Stella monument in Victory Park near the city center. He put on his jacket and hugged his parents goodbye. His mother was on the verge of crying, but she did not say anything. His father pleaded. “My boy, don’t go there. The OMON are organized. We are not organized. We can do nothing to them.” His father knew what he was talking about. He knew what happened to failed revolutionaries. But Sonia had to go.
He rode the bus downtown. When he arrived at the monument, the sun was beginning to set. The rally was massive. He judged there were already more than 5,000 people. He pushed his way to the front. When he got there, he could see fewer than a hundred OMON troops, but they were well-oiled from a summer’s worth of such rallies and were determined to prevent the demonstrators from amassing into another photo op for the international news. They threw a volley of flashbang grenades. One landed between Sonia’s legs. For several seconds he could not see or hear. When he regained himself, his jacket was burning. He smacked out the flame.
As the crowd grew larger, the OMON grew more aggressive, using flashbangs, tear gas, and water canons to break the crowd into small groups. At midnight, large trucks appeared behind the formation. The troops began swarming individual protestors, dragging them to the trucks where they disappeared. Those not swarmed were forced to retreat. The OMON pursued them.
The crowd flooded out of the park into the streets. Sonia and others zig-zagged through an open-air market then frantically scaled a tall fence that enclosed a public garden. In the panic, Sonia fell from the top of the fence. He hit the ground hard. He felt a tremendous pain in his leg and did not want to stand on it, but he knew he had to keep moving.
He exited the garden and was limping along a residential street when he saw one of the OMON trucks next to a group of protestors who were being detained. Before he could detour, the troops spotted him and chased him down. Two tackled him and dragged him to the truck. They were not going through the motions of an official arrest. They were just crushing as many protestors into the truck as possible.
The prisoners were driven to the Akrestina, a detention center for pre-trial suspects. When the doors at the back of the truck opened, guards with dogs and guards with machine guns were standing at the ready. Behind them, in two long lines, dozens of guards with truncheons were screaming at the prisoners to exit the truck. All the guards wore black balaclavas. Their uniforms bore no insignia.
Bodies were ripped from the doorway of the truck. The first prisoners fell to the ground and got stomped by the guards. Guards from the front of the truck herded the prisoners out the back. An unseen force took hold of Sonia’s jacket and whipped him at the concrete wall that formed the perimeter of the compound.
“On your knees, suka! Put your arms up! Keep your head on that f—ing wall!”
Sonia adopted the stress-position but made the mistake of glancing up at the guard. A foot or a truncheon came from somewhere and corrected his mistake. Sonia keeled over. He tasted blood in his mouth. The guard yelled again. Sonia complied.
He was still in the painful kneeling stress-position when the sun came up hours later. At some point, he was put in a line, and the line was marched into the main corridor of the Akrestina. The corridor was five meters wide and 40 meters long. It was covered in blood. The floor was slick with blood. There was blood splattered on the walls and on the doors of the cells. Along the bottom of the walls were piles of blood-soaked clothing. There was a body lying at the far end of the corridor. It was lying face down in a pool of blood.
Sonia stopped. Stunned.
Almost immediately a truncheon struck the small of his back and he stumbled forward. The line proceeded until the lead prisoner was at the far end of the corridor, where they were halted.
“Clothes off, peedorassi!”
The prisoners stripped. A guard searched each prisoner while other guards overwatched with machine guns. One prisoner was wearing a Pahonia bracelet. When the guard conducting the search saw it, he beat the man. Eventually, the man stopped reacting to the beating.
Once the strip search was completed, each prisoner was made to speak their name and address to a video camera before being crushed into a cell. The cells were designed to hold six people. There were at least 30 in Sonia’s cell. Many were involuntarily defecating themselves, some from fear, some from beatings. Some were coughing up blood. Due to a lack of oxygen, some lost consciousness. Sonia thought of his parents. He accepted he would die here.
Because the Akrestina was already out of space, the trial process had to be expedited. Within hours, the trials commenced. The courtroom was six folding tables spread down the length of the bloody hallway. At the tables sat six judges. A guard marched Sonia from his cell and sat him at one of the folding tables. Across the table was a woman in her mid-40s who had clearly been crying. The guard shouted at her, “Hurry up! We have a lot more suspects.” The judge’s hands were shaking as she read from her official documents. Sonia was charged with violating Article 23.34 of the Code of Administrative Offences: Participating in an Unauthorized Mass Event. He was found guilty. He was hereby sentenced to fourteen days in a labor camp. That concluded the trial.
§
Sonia was the commander of a machine gun squad when I met him. It was May of 2023, and I had just been assigned to his squad. Bakhmut had fallen to Wagner the week before, and our mission was to support Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade in its counter-offensive south of the city.
“Why did you join the bela-roosian regiment? Why not join a team for Westerners?”
“I hate dictators. I figured bela-roosians fighting in Ukraine would feel the same way.”
“Then you will come with us to liberate Belarus?”
“Do you think there will be a war in your country like the war in Ukraine?”
“It is the same. It is one war. Ukray-eens and bela-roosians fight the same enemy. Belarus is occupied lands. Ukra-yeen is grey zone. We must first win in grey zone to have a possibility to liberate occupied lands.”
I couldn’t argue with his military logic.
Dave Smith is a retired Major in the Canadian Armed Forces. He is now fighting for Ukraine in the war there. He previously authored an op-ed in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail earlier this year outlining why he decided to serve in Ukraine.