Five years ago almost to the day, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was a housewife and mother in Belarus. Her days revolved around her husband, Sergei, and their young son and daughter.
“My previous life was the life of an ordinary person,” she says, “taking care of my family with my wonderful husband. After 2020, the course of my life changed radically.”
I am talking to Tsikhanouskaya on Zoom in Lithuania, where she is now in exile and her husband is in prison. His crime was to defy Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator who has controlled Belarus for more than 30 years. Sergei campaigned for political reform, travelling the country and posting videos about corruption and bureaucracy on social media. He planned to stand against Lukashenko in presidential elections. Instead, he was arrested and imprisoned on trumped-up charges of organising mass unrest. At first he was allowed access to lawyers. Then, two years ago, he vanished. Nothing has been heard of him since.
“He just disappeared somewhere in prison,” says Tsikhanouskaya, 42, from Vilnius, where she lives with their children. “He is kept incommunicado. Human rights defenders call it a forced disappearance. I want to believe that he is still alive, but for two years we have heard nothing: no letter, no lawyers allowed to see him. We don’t know where he is or what state he is in. We don’t know if he is alive.”
After Sergei’s arrest, Tsikhanouskaya could have just kept her head down. Instead, she decided to run against Lukashenko herself. Lukashenko didn’t bother arresting her, like he had her husband, because he thought nobody would vote for a woman. But by the time of the election, in summer 2020, Tsikhanouskaya was on course to win and claims she secured between 60 and 70 per cent of the vote. The election was widely condemned as rigged, with the regime claiming that it won 80 per cent of the vote. The announcement was met with the biggest protests in the history of Belarus, which Lukashenko crushed using detainment, torture and murder.
• Inside the Death Zone, where migrants are pawns for Belarus
Tsikhanouskaya fled across the border to Lithuania with her children and the clothes they stood up in. She had a backpack holding the medical documents she needed for her son, who has special needs, but that was it. No photos, no toys, no books, nothing.
Now she tours Europe drumming up support and planning for a hoped-for future as a member of the EU. She says again and again that as long as Minsk is in hock to Moscow, Europe will not be safe and any peace in Ukraine isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. She echoes the words of President Zelensky, who told the Munich Security Conference last month that the eastern border of Europe has to be the eastern border of Belarus.
“If not,” she says, “it will give Putin another 1,000km of border with the European Union. Without a free and democratic Belarus, there will be constant threats and blackmails to European stability and security. People think Ukraine and Belarus are two different issues, but they’re not.”
‘I tell my children their father is a hero’
Her children are now 14 and 9, and she doesn’t sugarcoat what happened. She tells them everything that’s going on in Belarus and Ukraine, where their father has gone and why.
“I tell them that their daddy is a hero for fighting a dictator and a tyrant. Of course, on a personal level, as children, they feel grief, especially my younger daughter. She was only five years old when she saw her daddy for the last time. Now, she’s almost ten. My son is older; he is becoming the man. He’s taking care of ‘his girls’ instead of Daddy. It’s painful.”
One released Belarusian political prisoner told Tsikhanouskaya that the guards sometimes dangle letters from home in front of detainees, then rip them to shreds. At weekends, Tsikhanouskaya and the children watch home videos of Sergei, to hear his voice, see his mannerisms and watch the way he speaks to people, to keep his memory alive. She tries not to let the children see her own sadness. As far as the children are concerned, the videos are of happy family trips and she wants them to have happy memories of their father. “It’s my task,” she adds, “for them not to forget about their daddy.”
Her daughter writes him letters in prison, but they don’t know if he gets them. Once, she scribbled something slapdash and told her mother to send it. Tsikhanouskaya was having none of it.
“I told her, ‘Look, your daddy is sitting in a very small cell. There are no colours. He doesn’t see sky; he doesn’t see green leaves. So you have to draw the most colourful picture you can for him to remember how the colours look. You can even scent your letter for him, because there is nothing for him to smell.’ She was crying during these conversations but, although it’s painful, now she can understand his sacrifice. I explain that he’s doing this for her and her brother, and for the millions of other children living in a country where people are afraid of the government and the police, and of speaking out and living.”
Will they ever be reunited as a family?
“Absolutely. Absolutely I believe that. Regimes sometimes seem invincible, until they suddenly collapse.”
‘The fight for democracy is paved with tears and pain’
She brushes away the question of whether she regrets making herself a target by standing against Lukashenko. That’s a fantasy, she says; you can’t change the past. And besides, the point isn’t her own personal situation — it’s all the other people who’ve been shot, imprisoned or forced into exile by the regime.
“Fighting for democracy sounds very brave and courageous,” she says in her excellent English. “But it is paved with tears and pain and suffering and lives ruined. This fight is disgusting.”
No one knows how long the regime’s arms are when it comes to reprisals, but she doesn’t have time to worry about her own safety or that of her children. If she thought about it, she’d be too terrified to get on with her life. Thoughtful and forceful, her anger is nevertheless visceral about the plight of Belarus: the fact that its identity is being subsumed by Russia, on Lukashenko’s nod; the fact that speaking Belarusian is officially frowned upon (Tsikhanouskaya claims that it’s “a crime”); the fact that it’s being used as a staging post for Putin’s war against Ukraine. From Vilnius, Tsikhanouskaya is therefore trying to construct and head up a viable Belarusian government in waiting, the Coordination Council, ready for the day when — not if, she insists — Lukashenko’s regime collapses.
“People are not immortal,” she says. “As with Stalin, so with Lukashenko or Putin. It’s just a person and when the person disappears, everything crumbles.”
Her job is to make sure that Belarusians are ready. In the past five years she thinks they have become much more interested in politics, more aware that there might be an alternative to Lukashenko, although the regime cracks down brutally on dissent. Getting accurate information is difficult and dangerous, but 15 to 20 people are estimated to be arrested every day, she claims. The president, she says derisively, is afraid of his own people.
I ask her about President Trump’s attempts to broker a peace deal. The problem, as Tsikhanouskaya sees it, is that Putin doesn’t want peace. He is playing for time to rearm and regroup, trying to weaken western unity. Dictators are pathological liars, she says bitterly: “Any dialogue with him must be based on respect for international law and accountability for war crimes.”
Her problem is that neither of those things appear to matter very much, at least in public, to the White House. Trump boasted on the campaign trail that he could achieve peace in 24 hours, which she says was just an exaggeration, a sign of how much he wants to end the war.
“Everybody wants to end this war. But the peace must be just and long-lasting.”
‘Democracy is easy to lose’
The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, has accused Trump of appeasement and said the free world needs a new leader. Tsikhanouskaya phrases it slightly differently — the world needs a leader who defends democratic values, and it’s up to the American people to decide if their leader is doing so.
“Democracy is easy to lose. The policy of the new administration is more pragmatic, transactional, America first, and that is maybe like a cold shower for the EU. But what about democratic values? It’s vital that Europe makes decisions that are values-orientated, not business-orientated. If we lose our moral principles, we’ll lose everything.”
She’s met Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny, and smiles at the idea that Putin and Lukashenko might be irritated by the fact that two of their fiercest critics are women.
“Of course they are! They’re old-style dictators who think that women’s place is in the kitchen, in church and with children. It was an awful shock to them that women can be leaders. In Belarus, women were absolutely underestimated.”
Tsikhanouskaya even underestimated herself: she suffered for a long time from impostor syndrome, thrust into a high-profile political position for which she had neither training nor ambition. Theirs was a “traditional” family, she says, in which Sergei was the man and she was the woman. She trained as an English teacher, but gave up her job to stay at home and support her son after he was born with special needs. It’s been a steep learning curve to the polished politician of today.
“I have to fulfil duties I never thought about or dreamt about. I have to speak on behalf of the Belarusian people, persuade the world why Belarus is important.”
‘These hardships are a test of our devotion to each other’
I wonder what her husband would make of what she’s doing. I expect her to say that he would be proud, and she does, but then she looks hesitant.
“It really worries me, because he knew me in 2020 when I was absolutely different. When he’s released, I will be another person. But our love remains the same. I think he understands that I am doing everything that I can in the situation. The thing is, I love him more than I did in 2020.
“These hardships are a test of our feelings, of our devotion to each other. Our marriage was based on love. It’s not about positions; it’s personalities. We have children, we have family. What’s important for me is that, at the moment of his release, I can say, look, this burden is now yours. I’ve worked enough.” She says this with a smile, half-joking.
She has no personal ambition for high office, vowing to stay until there are free and fair elections in which she would not stand. Would she like Sergei to stand?
“I would like him to, but political prisoners who have been released say that you are so exhausted physically and emotionally, you don’t want to do anything. But my husband is an extremely strong and brave person. This wasn’t like a political career to him. It was like his soul needed this. He really wanted to make people’s lives better.”
Tsikhanouskaya said in 2022 that she was confident that Ukraine would win the war, but that dream now seems dead. She scoffs at this idea and says of course it isn’t. But unless and until it does win, and unless and until Lukashenko is toppled or dies or is otherwise disposed of by Moscow, Tsikhanouskaya remains in exile, a grateful guest of Lithuania, which recognises her as the legitimate head of the state of Belarus.
The concept of exile can be hard to understand, she says, if you can travel the world but always go home. “We cannot visit the graves of our grandmothers or the house where we grew up,” she says. “It doesn’t get any easier. We miss home.”
