br23 blog - minsk, belarus

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. […]

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 […]

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, […]

A youth opposition activist Mikita Sasim has been handed a three month jail sentence for draft evasion.
First of all, virtually no one goes to jail in Belarus for draft evasion. This is exceptional. Second, last autumn he had been granted a deferral from the army doctors because of brain injuries which he sustained after being […]

Alexander Milinkevich was released from jail this morning and staged a press conference in front of the prison gates.
Belarus’ opposition leader commented on an article from a Russian newspaper “Kommersant” which states that Vladimir Putin ordered to stop subsidizing Belarusian economy and is forcing Lukashenka to create a union state under Moscow rule.
Alexander Milinkevich said:
“One […]

Some hacker has intercepted police talks from the “Chernobyl March” opposition rally in Minsk and put them on the Web (here). Police speaks in Russian, the quality is dreadful, and they use their own jargon and code numbers, so I didn’t get a whole lot from the audio (mp3, 11 minutes). Here are some of […]

Alexander Milinkevich was arrested today in the morning at the office of an independent newspaper and, about two hours ago, Lukashenka’s “justice” system decided to sentence him to a 14-day arrest for organizing an “illegal” Chernobyl protest.
In my opinion, this is the most crucial point after the “elections”. If this arrest of the leader produces […]

• scotsman.com: Time to liquidate Scotland and sell off her assets, says expat historian
“The idea that Scotland might one day ‘be a nation again’ should simply be dropped. We had our chance, when everyone else in Europe had it, in the 19th and 20th centuries. But we calculated that the Union and the Empire were […]