28/05/2026
Worth reading!
By August 2021, Dymna Lotva frontwoman Katsiaryna Mankevich had been in hiding in her home country of Belarus for almost a year. The previous summer, she and her bandmates – along with more than 100,000 other people – had taken to the streets to protest against the country’s authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko.
The government had started arresting anyone associated with the protests, and banned Dymna Lotva’s gigs. Katsiaryna understood she would soon have to leave behind everything she knew.
“They searched for me for about a year, but nobody knew my address,” she recalls. “I would not even answer phone calls from my mum. When the police came for our guitarist, we understood that it was time to run. So, in the next three days, we escaped with one bag, one guitar and my cat.”
A landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the east, Ukraine to the south, and Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to the north and west, Belarus is widely considered ‘Europe’s last dictatorship’. Since 1994, it has been ruled by Alexander Lukashenko, who took control in the first free election since Belarus declared independence from the Soviet Union.
Although elections have been held in the decades since, these have widely been dismissed as shams. In the run-up to the elections in August 2020, two of his rivals were prevented from running and jailed, while one fled. Lukashenko won a landslide victory, but there were allegations of vote-rigging.
The European Union said it did not recognise the results. Members of the public, already angry about the way Lukashenko handled Covid-19 – he suggested tackling it with vodka, saunas and hard work – enacted the largest anti-government protests in Belarus’s history, but the authorities quickly cracked down. One man was found hanged in the woods – police said there was no evidence of foul play – land was seized from those who fled the country, and authorities ordered banks to seize money raised to help protesters.
“Every presidential election after his first one has been stolen,” Katsiaryna outlines with fierceness.
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(Words: Perran Helyes
Photo: Nadja Greena)
