br23 blog - minsk, belarus

In the spring of 2006, shortly before the tragic accident Rydel won the Gran Prix in the content competition organized by tut.by .

Dear Friends,
All of you that knew Uladzimir Katkouski, personally or through the net, may come and pay your respects to him, on Saturday, the 2nd of June till 15:00 at the address: Mensk, Sharanhovicha street, house.52, apt. 161. The funeral procession starts at 15:00 and we will all go towards the Piatroushchyna cemetery (crossing […]

Dear Friends,
Tonight was the saddest day of our lives. Uladzimir, after a long fight passed away in Prague. We believe it was his wish to be returned to his home country Belarus. He will be buried next week in Minsk. Our consolation is that a lot of people are feeling for him and are with […]

Tomasz Wacko (pronounced Vah-ts-koh) died exactly three years ago. Until yesterday I didn’t even know he existed.
He was an opposition (”Solidarnosc”) activist from Poland, who found refuge in Norway and became a prominent human rights activist at the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, also devoting a lot of time and effort to the democracy cause in Belarus. […]

Is it just me or geographical mix-ups with Belarus are now happening more and more often? New Dehli TV (India) reports from Paris:
“Bhupathi and Xavier Malisse of Belarus registered an easy 6-2, 6-2 victory over Gilles Muller of Luxemburg and Christophe Rochus of Belarus to move into the second round of the clay court event.” […]

As you can see, Eurosport editors put up the national white-red-white flag (!) next to the name of the Belarusan tennis player Anastassia Yakimova who was playing against Belgian star Henin-Hardenne today on the main court of Roland Garros. The white-red-white flag was banned by Alexander Lukashenka in 1996. Since then he forbid using it […]

My online friend Evgeny Morozov wrote yet another brilliant commentary for “Brussels Journal”:
The Russia-EU summit which took place in the Russian city of Sochi last week, was another foreign policy debacle for the European Union. Of course, the EU did reach a number of technical agreements with the Kremlin on issues like visa facilitation, but […]

Good news for RuSSian Nazis and imperialists. Sky Europe (the largest Central European low-cost airline) and “Novy Smichov” (one of the largest shopping malls in Czech Republic) are vouching their full support for Russian imperialism. Here’s the proof of endorsment:

(full-size screenshot)
The “new” map of Europe was spotted at the information kiosk at the main entrance […]

I had an impression after our presidential “elections” that news coverage about Belarus very quickly subsided and returned to pre-election levels after Belarusans “failed” to stage a color revolution contary to Westerners’ expectations. This was just a subjective impression, but my hunch turned out to be correct. Recently, Google launched yet another new nifty tool, […]

It’s a historical victory over Switzerland. For the first time since Belarus gained independence our national ice hockey team has made it to the quarter finals of the world championship. We are playing Finland (Suomi) after tomorrow. What do we know about Finland, except Nokia? We know that they literally call us “White Russia” with […]