NEW! You can listen to this post above. In a few weeks, this will become a subscribers-only feature, so if you like it, you know what to do.
I had just watched the sun come up over the Great Smoky Mountains when I was jolted back to real life after reading the news that Raman Pratasevich, a Belarusian journalist and political activist, had been arrested in Minsk after his Athens-Vilnius flight was forced down by the Belarusian authorities. Pratasevich, a former editor-in-chief of NEXTA, the Telegram channel that Belarusians had relied on since last summer’s crackdown as a 24/7 newswire of unfiltered information, had been declared an extremist by the Lukashenka regime last fall. Through internet blockades and under extreme duress, Belarusians kept sending reports of the regime’s democratic and human rights violations to NEXTA in the aftermath of the August 2020 rigged elections. Along with Belarusians, the world was watching as we witnessed peaceful protestors being attacked, arrested, and even disappeared. I drank from the firehose that is NEXTA for about two months after the protests began, and still regularly check it for updates. It is no wonder the channel and Pratasevich are on Lukashenka’s hit list.
Belarus may have fallen off your radar since last summer, and though fewer protestors are on the streets these days, they still resist. They employ quieter—though still incredibly risky—displays of dissent, like wearing red and white, the colors of the historial Belarusian flag that the opposition has taken as their own. Svitlana Tsikhanouskaya, opposition leader-in-exile, continues to meet with foreign leaders (this week, U.S. Senators Portman, Murphy, and Shaheen are in Vilnius with her). And every week there is a new and troubling update about the lengths the Lukashenka regime is going to attempt to quash popular resistance. It has attacked independent media. Opposition activists have died in jail under suspicious circumstances. Yesterday, another activist stabbed himself in the neck with a pen during a court hearing, “after claiming investigators had pressured him to plead guilty or face his family and friends being arrested.”
Belarus is still in crisis, however much we in the West might like to look the other way. I have cared about Belarus for a long while, devoting much of my undergraduate and graduate research to the country, and spending several years manning the Belarus portfolio at the National Democratic Institute. There, I got to know the colorful, vocal cast of Belarusian opposition politicians, most of whom have gotten to know police truncheons and the insides of prisons equally intimately. They are by no means perfect, and have struggled to unify and organize against the regime for years. But, like the Senators visiting Tsikhanouskaya this week, like President Biden and his family, like every VIP I’ve ever met, they are human. They have human concerns—economic, political, and personal. So reading the news about the 26-year-old Pratasevich and his visible fear as his plane taxied in Minsk, my heart sank, not only out of sympathy, but out of frustration.
As I wrote in a new essay for The Washington Post, the West has been too soft on Lukashenka for too long. We have accepted too little as progress in an attempt to stabilize relations with Belarus. Most recently, the Trump administration used “high-level visits from U.S. officials like Bolton and Pompeo…to demonstrate the administration’s presumptive ability to stand up to Russia and counter its influence in the region without having to directly do so.” Ultimately:
The hijacking of the Ryanair flight and Pratasevich’s arrest, along with the past nine months of repression in Belarus, are evidence of misguided interpretations of Minsk’s democratic “progress” in the past decade. Rather than openly condemning Belarus’s escalating authoritarian actions and maintaining pressure on Minsk to prevent further democratic backsliding, the West’s coddling of Lukashenka in an attempt to woo him away from Moscow created the circumstances for the dangerous precedent of state-sponsored hijacking. It’s a precedent that other authoritarian states will seek to emulate, and one the United States and its allies should not soon forget.
The Biden administration, for its part, is taking Lukashenka’s unprecedented actions seriously. Last week, it issued a “Do Not Travel” warning “to U.S. citizens urging them not to travel to Belarus.” Today, it reimposes full blocking sanctions on key Belarusian state enterprises, and will explore further unilateral and joint EU-US sanctions on Minsk. The EU has encouraged European airlines to avoid overflights of Belarusian airspace and will adopt measures to prevent Belarusian airlines from flying over the EU and accessing European airports, a move that has met criticism from the human rights community; activists point out that the decision does more to punish ordinary Belarusians seeking to leave the country than the increasingly repressive Lukashenka regime.
After years of tentative rapprochement, the West is going to have to feel its way through the successive wake up calls the Belarusian political crisis has sent since last August.
Back in Washington, besieged by cicadas and staring down another sticky DC summer, I hope last week’s wake-up call in the form of a state-sponsored hijacking has a little more staying power than my idyllic Smoky Mountain sunrise.
a little housekeeping
I know, I disappeared again. Sorry! I was doing a little thinking about what I want this newsletter to look like as I’ve transitioned out of my full-time gig at the Wilson Center (though I remain a non-resident fellow there) to focus on some teaching and other exciting projects this summer (stay tuned)!
Here’s what I’ve decided: wiczipedia will continue to be a place I publish writing that perhaps wouldn’t find a home elsewhere, either because it is on the niche end of the spectrum or because editorial staff are focused on the hot issues pegged to the news cycle. Since this newsletter launched, I’ve brought you a number of in-depth features on the COVID-19 “infodemic,” an Instagram cash-for-comments scheme, and essays on topics as disparate as deep fake porn, the political crisis in Belarus, and online inhumanity. These pieces—particularly the features, which require hours of qualitative and quantitative research—take time and resources.
I know it’s a hard sell to ask you to subscribe to another newsletter on top of your subscriptions to streaming services and newspapers and magazines and your monthly contribution to your public radio station. I get it. That’s why I’m making most of the content in this newsletter free for all to access.
Paid subscribers will get extra perks, including:
Audio recordings of every newsletter, so if you don’t have time to read what I’ve written, you can have me read it to you while you cook, wash the dishes, or walk the dog. (Test out this week’s audio recording above.)
The ability to comment on each post. Some Substack newsletters have a highly interactive community; I’d love to get into more substantive discussions here, too.
Exclusive posts, as my schedule allows. I plan to write one piece per week that is free for all to read, and may write others that are only available to paid subscribers.
Thanks for reading and for your support, especially if you’ve been here since the beginning—it means so much.
belarus: a final wake up call?