The Little Buggers

• Irina Khalip
• 3.04.2026, 14:33

They're gonna rat each other out just so you can write it down.

Last fall, we were sitting in a Vilnius cafe with political prisoners taken from colonies, and Evgeny Afnagel and Maksim Viniarski were laughing about Dmitry Kozlov (aka blogger Gray Cat). We, the guys said, were first brought to the KGB detention center and kept there overnight, and then taken to the border with Lithuania and instead of passports they gave us certificates and single-entry visas on a piece of paper. But Gray Cat is a bourgeois compared to us homeless people - he has a passport.

So now he doesn't. This week, it turned out that those who were expelled from Belarus "richly" with passports, they were simply canceled. The passports had expiration dates stamped on them, but they were invalid. One of the former political prisoners discovered this by accident and informed others. Others went to the website of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to check the authenticity of their own passports and found that their documents had also turned into a pumpkin. And since the legislation specifies the cases, in which a passport is recognized invalid, it can be assumed that political prisoners are deprived of Belarusian citizenship retroactively, but they are not informed about it. None of them, of course, applied for the loss of their passports or replacement of the damaged or expired document. So, deprivation of citizenship? However, no one would be surprised at that either.

It would seem that if you throw people out of the country, forget about them. You can be happy: they won't bother you anymore, they won't create problems, they won't take to the streets with flags. It seems as if you even won: you kept them in prisons for years, deprived them of health, tortured them a lot, and then expelled them. But no, after the fact, in the aftermath, when any normal enemy would have long forgotten about this story, you need to cancel their passports. Simply because the enemy is not really an enemy at all, but just a petty thief. Such people cut bags in streetcars - not to get their wallets out, but out of spite. They rob grandmothers near the market - not to get a bunch of seeds, but out of the same nastiness. Such people write denunciations on their neighbors - not in order to take possession of their apartments, but out of insurmountable nastiness.

That's how Lukashenko and his nephews are. They understand perfectly well that they can't spoil the life of the former political prisoner by canceling his passport. But they can easily cause a few unpleasant minutes. If a person thinks that his passport is an ordinary, valid one, and is going to go on a visit or vacation, he will not be allowed to cross the border or will be taken off the flight. Not jailed, not deported, not suspected of fraud. But the vacation will be ruined, or an important trip will be canceled, or a meeting with relatives will not take place. Nothing fatal, but nasty. That's what the petty scoundrels are counting on.

The same way they deprived former political prisoners Alexandr Yaroshuk and Hennady Fedynich of their pensions - veterans of the independent trade union movement, who devoted decades of their lives to the struggle for the observance of labor rights of Belarusians. Yaroshuk started working as an agronomist in 1975, which means his labor experience is half a century. Gennady Fedynich started working as a mechanic the same year after school. And then, after graduating from polytechnic and working in the design bureau of precision electronic machine building, he became the first elected chairman of the REP trade union, which was established in 1990. By the way, this trade union united both Integral and Horizont - giants of the Belarusian industry - and many other enterprises. The REP trade union held on to the last, even when other independent trade unions quietly closed down to avoid trouble. And everyone went to REP - even those who had nothing to do with the radio-electronic industry. They knew that REP would help.

And these respected trade unionists, who continued to work even at retirement age, Lukashenko first sent them to jail, then threw them out of the country. If he were not a petty thief surrounded by the same petty thieves, he would have rubbed his hands, rejoicing at the final destruction of the trade union movement in the country, and forgotten about Fedynich and Yaroshuk. But thieves are not like that - they can't help but shit on small things. Only from this they get pleasure.

But they have another peculiarity: petty thieves are cowardly to the extreme. And as soon as a black swan, or a black crow, or a black fly arrives, the petty thieves begin to surrender, drown, destroy each other. So the work of the investigation will be minimal: they will tell everything themselves, just have time to write it down.

Irina Khalip, especially for Charter97.org.