CIVILIANS FACE REPRESSION FOR SHARING RUSSIAN TROOP MOVEMENTS ~ Nikita Ivansky ~ In September 2025, opposition media in Belarus estimated that one thousand civilians —many unknown to to human rights defenders—have been prosecuted for spreading intelligence about Russian troop movements on Telegram since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2024. Preparations for the invasion were made in Belarus under the guise of military training. When Belarusians found themselves on the Kremlin’s side of the war, there existed a partisan movement which sabotaged the railroad system to paralyze troop movement, while a larger part of society joined the silent resistance by taking pictures and videos of Russian military personnel at bases or in transit. They sent these images and videos to different Telegram channels to provide the Ukrainian resistance with crucial information on the movement of aviation or rocket/drone launches, which often targeted civilian infrastructure One of the biggest information gathering projects that emerged from this was called Belarusian Hajun, a Telegram channel with a bot to where people could send pictures directly. Within several weeks, the project exploded, with over 30,000 information points sent in the first 45 days of the invasion. While the project was a huge open-source intelligence success in countering the Russian war, the Belarusian state began hunting those providing such information from the very beginning. Among them was antifascist Anna Pyshnik, who was sentenced to three years in prison for sending pictures of the military on Telegram. She served her whole term and was released in 2024, she had to leave Belarus in fear of further political prosecution. “When the war started, it was difficult to comprehend”, said Pyshnik after her release. “The very next day, I heard something like an explosion; even our building shook. I ran outside and saw a rocket trail. I decided to film it. You just stand there and realise how close the war is, you realise how the authorities are lying when they say that nothing will ever happen to Ukraine from Belarusian territory. I understood that people needed to know what was happening. So I sent the video I had filmed to independent media outlets. Two days later, I filmed military helicopters over the city and sent that to the media as well”. At the beginning of 2025, the Belarusian secret police infiltrated a critical Telegram chat on Belarusian Hajun, obtaining information on thousands of accounts working for the project. Many of these accounts belonged to people inside the country. Since then, a massive wave of repression has begun against anyone who participated in the project by sending reports. At least 54 people were prosecuted for helping the project under the charge of “aiding an extremist organisation”. The attack on the Belarusian Hajun project was made possible by an old link found on the phone of someone arrested before February 2025. Created in 2022, this link allowed them to join a closed chat containing critical information. This is not the first time the KGB has managed to access closed chats and collect information leading to more prosecutions. The post Belarus’s informational partisans appeared first on Freedom News.

THE REGIME DEPORTED 52 POLITICAL PRISONERS IN EXCHANGE FOR SANCTIONS RELIEF ~ Nikita Ivansky ~ Anarchist Nikolai (Mikola) Dziadok was among 52 political prisoners released and deported from Belarus to Lithuania on 11 September, following negotiations between dictator Alexander Lukashenko and US envoy John Colae. In return, the US lifted sanctions on the state airline Belavia and renewed calls to reopen its embassy in Minsk—one of the largest prisoner buyouts since the 2020 uprising. Dziadok, arrested in 2020 and held in torture conditions and near-total isolation, had faced up to 13 years in prison on charges of organising “Autonomous Action Belarus”, labelled a criminal group by the regime. He had previously served five years (2010–2015) before being pardoned as one of the last prisoners of that period. Although his release had been nominally scheduled for April, a new case was opened against him, prolonging his detention. Like the others freed, Dziadok was taken by bus to the Lithuanian border and expelled. Belarusian KGB officers tore up his passport, as they did for several prisoners that day, deliberately complicating their lives in exile. Most of those deported had no legal status in the EU, though Lithuania has granted them temporary visas. Anarchists from the Belarusian group Pramen described the deportations as “a new punishment: instead of jail time, they’re now facing indefinite exile to EU countries. Lukashenko’s regime is trying to get rid of not only the prisoners themselves, but also their families, kids, and loved ones, who’ll be forced to leave Belarus after five years of fighting against prison”. Not all accepted the deal. Opposition leader Mikola Statkevich refused to leave Belarus when brought to the “neutral” border zone, reportedly telling KGB agents: “I don’t care about your kolkhoz leader”—a jab at Lukashenko’s Soviet-era past. After several hours, masked men took him back into Belarus. His fate remains unknown. Talks of trading political prisoners for sanctions have circulated for months. Liberal opposition circles in exile are even discussing a temporary camp in Lithuania to host further releases. More than 1,300 people remain imprisoned in Belarus today, including 24 anarchists and antifascists. The post Anarchist prisoner released from Belarus appeared first on Freedom News.

HOW WESTERN LEFTISTS AND ANARCHISTS FOUND ‘CONVENIENT’ VOICES FROM EASTERN EUROPE ~ Nikita Ivansky ~ Debates on anti-militarism continue to shake the anarchist movement in the western part of the world. Often in these debates we can see some organisations from Ukraine or Russia show support for the ‘no war but class war’ position. Three and a half years since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the anarchist movement is extremely divided. Previous strategies of ‘listening to local voices’ have mostly failed for those who were not interested in the first place. With more scandals certain to come in the future, it’s important to understand how we came to this point. More than 10 years ago, Russia annexed Crimea and occupied part of eastern Ukraine. Even then, the Kremlin cited various reasons for the occupation depending on the political views of its target audience. For the leftist/anti-fascist movement, Russian propagandists prepared a narrative that a fascist regime in Kyiv had seized power illegally. The 2014 invasion was presented as an anti-fascist action. Most anarchists and anti-fascists in the region had developed immunity to such lies over many years of propaganda. But for some Western anti-fascists and leftists, the presence of fascist flags during the Maidan protests was so shocking that they believed the story of a far-right coup without further facts.  Many anarchists in Ukraine at the time believed that to fight the Russian Empire, it was enough familiarise oneself with the situation in order to understand what was occurring in the country, and to provide facts what was happening. In Belarus, we had a similar idea of how to work with comrades in the West in the fight against Russian propaganda. This was: the truth speaks for itself, and those who insist on Putin’s position are just people who, for some reason, have not been reached by the facts. But, even then, we encountered people who knew better about what was happening in your own house. I still remember how, at one presentation, an anti-authoritarian activist from Ukraine talked about Maidan and the situation after the protests, and a German expert responded by talking about how Kyiv was simply occupied by fascists. Attempts to prove him wrong were useless in that moment. Russian propaganda had already done its job. Back then, sitting at a presentation about Ukraine, it didn’t even occur to me that we were incredibly naive in our belief in critical thinking within the anarchist and leftist milieu… After the full-scale invasion, I was one of those who insisted on the need to hear the voices of anarchists from Ukraine in order to understand the war and what we could do in this situation, depending on our capabilities. In my mind, such calls turned into the formation of permanent contacts between Western groups and activists from Ukraine/Belarus/Russia. And for a while, that’s what happened as people became interested, researched, and listened. But it didn’t last long. Soon after, self-proclaimed fighters with militarism within the anarchist movement appeared on the horizon. For them, the messages of Ukrainian and Russian anarchists were unacceptable. Instead of organising in solidarity, some Western leftists and anarchists decided to look for groups within Belarus/Ukraine/Russia that would fully correspond to their dogmatic perspectives on the war and the role of Western countries in it. In Russia, such allies were found relatively quickly. For anti-militarists, the Russian organisation KRAS-MAT’s positions was easily integrated into the Western mothballed analysis of wars. They turned the Kremlin’s attack on Ukraine into a clash between the ruling elites of both countries. Texts calling on Ukrainian society to lay down their arms and start fighting their own government began to spread across various anarchist and left-wing websites. The leftists and anarchists were not particularly interested in the criticism of KRA-MAT by other groups within the affected regions. The ideological proximity of the Western left to KRAS-MAT was more important than any political problems with the syndicate of academics, which had long since ceased to try to participate in the workers’ movement in Russia. However, KRAS-MAT’s position was relatively weak even in the eyes of Western anarchists. After all, the organisation exists within the aggressor state, where resistance to the war is almost completely absent. In this situation, some left-wing pacifists and anti-militarists began to chaotically search for allies in Ukraine and Belarus who could confirm their political analysis of the region. In 2022-2023, some pacifists and anti-militarists found the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement (UPM). The UPM has never declared its commitment to any leftist views, and a mixture of right-wing and left-wing ideas can often be found on the organisation’s information platforms. Moreover, Western leftists were not particularly bothered by the fact that one of the leaders of the organisation is the pro-Russian blogger Ruslan Kotsaba who was was expelled from the organisation in 2023. Nine months later he became part of the right-wing pro-Russian organisation ‘Another Ukraine.’ During the same period, European anarchists and leftists also discovered Assembly, another Ukrainian organisation. However, it was not the leftists who flocked to Assembly, but rather the authors of Assembly who, with the help of automatic translations, broke into leftist platforms such as libcom, completely filling the information field about Ukraine. The collective’s texts, often written in a sensationalist style, fit well with the old political analyses of leftists and some anarchist organizations in the West. For most activists, Assembly can be understood from this excerpt, which begins the story of resistance to mobilisation in Ukraine: “Throughout the territory of the Gulag darkness in the middle of Europe, a people’s war against war is spreading. The heirs of the freedom-loving Zaporozhye Cossacks, Makhnovists, and rebels of Karmalyuk and Dovbush are responding with their own violence to the violence of the heirs of the NKVD, Gestapo, and Pinochet’s death squads. And we are only on the threshold of a full-scale round-up of conscripts, which is expected after July 16.” In essence, Assembly does not write anything special. Rather, it collects discontent within Ukrainian society such as: the fight against corruption, resistance to mobilisation, the lawlessness of local officials. All of which is written about by the Ukrainian media and in social networks. The lack of criticism of the Russian regime and their attempts to put Russia and Ukraine on an equal political footing show, at least, Assembly’s unwillingness to understand the Russian world. The relative popularity of Assembly in Western circles has only reinforced the dogmatism of the group, which is completely removed from any anarchist organisations in the region. The only exception being their active cooperation with the aforementioned KRAS-MAT. Activists from Ukraine and Belarus tried unsuccessfully to draw attention to the inadequacy of the Assembly. But, once again, they came up against an ideological wall. Assembly, like other organisations, proved to be much more convenient for Western anti-militarists than the objective truth, which requires much greater effort in constant research, discussions, and even trips to war-torn countries. The situation in Belarus was even more complicated for the Western left than with Ukraine. After the 2020 crackdown on dissent and protests, there were only a few anarchist organisations left in Belarus and the leftist movement was largely absent and uninteresting. Belarusian anarchist organisations immediately condemned the war and called for resistance to Russian aggression. There were no equivalents of the Assembly or KRAS-MAT in the country. However, somewhere in the vastness of the internet and NGO business, the German left dug up Olga Karach with her project ‘Our Home,’ which since 2022 has been trying to sell stories to the West about mass resistance to compulsory military service in Belarus. Belarusian youth do indeed resist militarism, but this did not begin in 2022. It has existed for many decades. Websites and forums with information on how to avoid military service appeared in the early 2000s. But for Western activists, Olga Karach’s story seemed very plausible. Yet, the ideology of ‘Our Home’ can be described as… money. The project has been around for a long time and, during its existence, has managed to secure sufficient funds from European and American foundations for the development of democracy and human rights. But Olga Karach’s problems began after 2020, when Svetlana Tikhanovskaya appeared on the scene and dozens of new liberal organizations emerged to compete with ‘Our Home’s projects. For some time, Karach tried to fight Tikhanovskaya for leadership of the opposition, but she had relatively little chance, given that everyone within the opposition knew who Karach was. In November 2022, Pramen published an article about Karach with information that Western pacifists had begun to raise money for her projects. I personally had to communicate with some German leftists on this matter, but information about “Our Home” was largely ignored. Over many years in the NGO environment, Olga has become very skilled at selling the right messages to different political groups and seems to have become a regular contributor to the German anarcho-pacifist newspaper Graswurzel Revolution (Grassroots Revolution). At the moment, I doubt that discussions or presentations can lead to a greater understanding of what is happening among the ‘skeptics’ of the struggle against the ‘Russian world’. Further, in many ways three years of discussions about the war in Ukraine have once again shown my own naivety and belief in anarchists. For example, somewhere in the past we lost track of the pro-Russian Stalinist organisation “Borotba” from Ukraine, which for many years reinforced myths about the Ukrainian fascist regime, and no amount of texts or public speeches could eradicate this myth. Borotba’s ties to the Kremlin went largely unnoticed by Western leftist structures, and the damage done by the organization to the anti-fascist movement in Ukraine and beyond remains significant. For me, the situation in the anarchist movement is very reminiscent of something that happened to me in Greece. During one of my trips around the country, I had the good fortune to find myself in the same car as some Greek anti-fascists. It was a long journey, and I fell asleep quite quickly. Half an hour later, I was awakened by Russian Nazi rap. When I asked the Greek anti-fascists where they got such music, they replied that it was a gift from their anti-fascist friends in Donbas. When I told them that it was Nazi rap, they simply dismissed my comment. Fortunately, the Greek anti-fascists did not insist that we continue listening to the music of their friends from Donbas. Examples from three countries with different political groups shows that the concept ‘needing to listen to voices from the region’ does not work in cases of ideological dogmatism. Western leftists and some anarchists are willing to work with openly fraudulent organisations, just to preserve old ideological principles. With this approach, and in an atmosphere of information warfare, it becomes relatively easy to find a person or a group who will repeat slogans that are convenient and completely ignore a significant part of the organised anarchist movement. The post The anti-militarism of fools appeared first on Freedom News.

HOW THE BELARUSSIAN KGB HAS BEEN TARGETTING THE DIASPORA IN EUROPE ~ Nikita Ivansky ~ In 2023, a scandal broke out when a Belarusian opposition activists signed up for a job to “research” the Belarusian opposition for a special EU commission that was supposedly investigating corruption. The job was posted in one of the oppositional chats and turned out to be a scam created by KGB to collect data. The scammed activist was even paid small sums for his work. The story climaxed with the KGB publicly announcing that the activist was working for them—during one of the security workshops organized by the scammed person. Last year, a series of video interviews with an opposition journalist for a documentary were published on the web. The person later turned out to be a Belarussian KGB agent working out of Belarus. Parts of the interview were later even published by the state propaganda media to show success in its operations against the diaspora. In its fourth decade of existence, the Belarusian dictatorship now stands in the shadow of the Kremlin and its war in Ukraine. The horrors the Russian army has visited on occupied territories are quite often much worse than what Belarusian society has to go through. However, the war against any opposition was started by Lukashenko in 1994 and continues to this day. And if repressions of anarchists, antifascists and liberals inside the country quite often ends up in the mainstream media, the targetting of those living in the diaspora rarely attracts attention. With hundreds leaving the country after 2020, authoritarian states are using modern tricks to attack the opposition in “safe” countries. Belarussian KGB outing its own fake seminar, 2023 Some of the regime’s work is ‘classical’ spying. Military intelligence agent Pavel Rubtsov, who was extradited by Poland to Russia in August 2024 as part of a prisoner exchange, transmitted information about the Belarusian opposition in Warsaw to Moscow. According to the newspaper Wyborcza, Rubtsov, who was working undercover as Spanish journalist Pablo Gonzalez, informed the leadership in 2020 that he had met with members of the Coordination Council of the Belarusian opposition, and handed over data about the old and new offices of the “Belarus House” foundation. But on the internet, the Belarusian regime’s operations on the internet can sometimes resemble the activity of scam groups. In the past years, Belarusian political police has been running several phishing campaigns online, trying to gather information via unsuspecting activists. The fake EU seminar is a case in point: for months, the KGB was getting locations of different oppositional events and names of participants. In the 1990s, some oppositional politicians were recruited before leaving, and started to pass information back as soon as they ended up in some western country. This old-school tactic of recruiting people from society instead of trying to infiltrate oppositional circles continued through all these 30 years. Scandals around different activists who signed papers to work for the KGB continue on a regular basis now in exiled opposition circles. One example is the case of Fyodor Garbachou, the husband of a Belarusian journalist, who was found to have an agent passport in the name of Viktar Makeev issued before the protests of 2020. And even though it is unknown what Fiodor/Viktar was doing abroad, it is clear that he was recruited at some point in the past to work for KGB (while still officially working for the Wargaming development company). This tactic was used by the Tsarist and Soviet secret police for many generations, not only to be able to control dissidents in exile, but also to spread paranoia and mistrust within activists circles. Olga Semashko and Fyodor Gorbachev. Photo: social networks Pressure points on activists can also be arrests on drug charges or some other offenses, but also retaliation against their family members. These days it is quite common for relatives of activists who are living abroad and continuing political work to be arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to years in a penal colony on made-up charges. Through the control of relatives within the country, the Belarusian political police and KGB can control people outside of it, whether through preventing them from doing political work at all, or making them work for the regime to collect information on other activists. This is the case for many anarchists and antifascists who left the country in the past years. One of the anarchists from Belarus who died fighting in Ukraine is still listed as anonymous due to possible revenge prosecution of the relatives Taking these examples into account, we can only imagine the scale of operations of authoritarian regimes that have much bigger coffers, whether Russia, Iran or China. Quite often, western activists see those living in exile as a bit over-paranoid, with vivid imagination. However, as authoritarianism becomes more pervasive, it is crucial that we fully understand the dangers coming not only from within the state we are living in, but from outside as well.  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Top photo: Protest in Minsk, 2020. Wikimedia. The post Lukashenko’s tentacles: Scams, phishing and threats to families appeared first on Freedom News.

A WINDING DISCUSSION STARTS WITH CHINA’S DEEPSEEK AND ITS IMPACT ON US DOMINANCE IN THE SPHERE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. We then move on to Belarus, the Hungarian pursuit of anti-fascists, and the ineffectiveness of liberal governments in holding back fascism (again) before rounding off with some discussion on the fight against high speed rail in France. The post Anarchist News Review: Cheap AI panic, Extremism (un)defined and Water palavers appeared first on Freedom News.

THE FRONTMAN OF HATE TO STATE AND CHALIERA DIED LESS THAN TWO YEARS AFTER A STINT OF POLITICAL IMPRISONMENT ~ from Naša Niva ~ Viktar became interested in punk as a teenager, during the Soviet era. In the early 1990s, he went to Germany and lived there in a squat occupied by punks, participating in the local punk movement. After returning to Minsk, Mao brought not only impressions, but also knowledge about the punk scene in Europe. Mao wanted to play a style called crust punk, which is usually rough and heavy music with radical social lyrics. In 1997, Viktar Žarkievič became the founder and lyricist of the Minsk punk band Hate To State, which performed alongside outstanding figures of Belarusian rock of that time. The band existed until 2000, and they played the last concert together with the group Pravakacyja, in which [prominent fiction writer] Alhierd Bacharevič was the singer. After that, Viktar sporadically played in various bands and engaged in lesser-known projects. [He also worked for Navinki, a 1998-2003 satirical journal founded by members of anarchist group Čyrvony Žond – tr.] Žarkievič was detained by Belarusian political police in September 2022. During the detention, Viktor was severely beaten. In addition, they broke a frying pan on his head and forced him to drag the fridge door, which had punk and anarchist stickers and magnets from different years, into the police station. The man’s friends say that his health and morale were greatly undermined by 30 days in Akreścina detention centre. He complained of pain even after being released from prison. Žarkievič was fired from his job at the construction site and, at least at first, was not hired for a new one due to political charges. Victor had trouble making ends meet and often complained to his friends about his health problems. Viktar ‘Mao’ Žarkievič died on September 22, 2024 in his apartment in Minsk. According to acquaintances, his heart gave out. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A poem Mao would read at the start of every Hate To State gig, here taken from a 2013 reunion: Dictatorship is foundation of fascism, Stalin also loved dictatorship. Let a moron walk under the flag of totalitarianism With a hockey stick in hand. The main enemy of liberty is the state. It’s as simple as physical training: Discipline is foundation of fascism, Anarchy is the mother of order! The post Viktar ‘Mao’ Žarkievič (1973-2024) — Belarusian punk legend appeared first on Freedom News.