A Minsk court has sentenced Svetlana Tijanóvskaya, an opposition leader who stood in the elections in 2020 to contest the presidency of Belarus against Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994, to 15 years in prison in absentia.
The electoral results, which once again gave Lukashenko the winner with a large advantage (more than 80%), led to massive demonstrations against the veteran leader, whom the opposition accused of fraud. The Minsk regime responded with a brutal crackdown, during which 35,000 arrests were made.
Tijanóvskaya, like many other prominent opponents, left the country. Others decided to stay and are currently in prison.
The Belarusian authorities initiated a criminal case against Tijanóvskaya and four other opponents last January for “conspiracy to take power unconstitutionally”, an accusation that the opponent has described as a “farce”. The charge also includes creating and leading an extremist group, inciting hatred and harming national security.
According to the official Belta agency and the Viasna human rights center, in the opposition, the other convicted are the former Minister of Culture Pável Latushko, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison by the Minsk court; María Moroz, Olga Kovalkova and Sergei Dilevski, all three with a 12-year prison sentence. They are all out of the country.
According to the indictment, Tijanóvskaya and her allies organized protests in Belarus and then left the country “to commit criminal acts from abroad.”
This ruling is the latest move by the Belarusian regime to silence dissent. On March 3, another court in the capital sentenced the Nobel Peace Prize 2022 Alés Bialiatski, founder of Viasna, to 10 years in prison. Three other NGO activists also received jail sentences.
Tijanóvskaya’s husband is also in prison. Since December 2021, Sergei Tijanovsky has been serving an 18-year sentence.
In 2020 it was Tijanovski, a businessman and popular video blogger, who planned to run as a candidate in the presidential elections on August 9 of that year. But they accused him of organizing mass riots, inciting social hatred, hindering the work of the Electoral Commission and organizing actions against public order. He was arrested and, as a consequence, his wife decided to take his place and present her candidacy in the presidential elections against Lukashenko.
