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Last week, a man at an automobile plant said that he hadn’t been following an election campaign very closely because he’d been busy. This wasn’t a clichéd vox pop with a disaffected heartland voter, but rather a comment made by Alexander Lukashenko, who was visiting the plant as he himself sought a seventh term as president of Belarus, the Eastern European country he has now ruled for more than thirty years. Not that “sought” is the right word—Lukashenko is known as “Europe’s last dictator” (though the truth of this might depend on your definition of “Europe”), and whatever the truth of it, his dismissive comment reflected the inevitability of his election win. Nominally, there were four other candidates, but they didn’t really oppose Lukashenko; Steve Rosenberg, the ever-excellent BBC correspondent, spoke with two of them last week, one of whom told him that there is “no alternative” to Lukashenko and that “we are taking part in the election with the president’s team.” “There are times in history when countries are gripped by election fever,” Rosenberg wrote over the weekend. “January 2025 in Belarus is not one of them.”
The last presidential election, in 2020, was also a stage-managed sham—though on that occasion, election fever, if that’s the right way of putting it, did grip Belarus, in no small part because the stage management didn’t go as planned. Ahead of that vote, Sergei Tikhanovsky, a popular YouTuber critical of Lukashenko, had signaled his intent to run against him, and was jailed; Tikhanovsky’s wife, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, was permitted to run in his stead, apparently because the regime didn’t view her as a threat—Lukashenko was quoted as saying that a female president “would collapse, poor thing”—and yet her candidacy attracted enthusiastic support. When Lukashenko was nonetheless declared the winner with 80 percent of the vote, mass protests rose up. The authorities responded with a brutal crackdown.
Unsurprisingly, journalists were among the targets: dozens were arrested in the months before the election, a figure that rose well into the hundreds in the months afterward, according to the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ); many reported being beaten or otherwise assaulted by law enforcement. (One was shot at close quarters with a rubber bullet and spent nearly forty days in the hospital; the authorities reportedly said that they would fine the newsroom that employed her for failing to promptly report a workplace injury.) The regime also went after newsrooms’ accreditations, sought to intimidate journalists’ groups, deported two reporters from the Associated Press, and declared Nexta—an anti-regime channel on the messaging app Telegram that had both helped to coordinate the protests and streamed footage from them—to be “extremist material,” while attempting to extradite Roman Protasevich and Stepan Putilo, a pair of Belarusian activists-cum-journalists who ran the channel, from Poland, where they were based. Then, in May 2021, the regime sparked international condemnation when it brazenly grounded a commercial Ryanair plane that was flying over its territory and seized Protasevich and his girlfriend, who had been on board. And yet some in Nexta’s orbit continued to hope that Lukashenko would one day fall. “We have bet everything on it,” Jan Rudzik, a former Nexta staffer and friend of Putilo’s, told Charles McPhedran for a CJR feature published in the fall of 2021. “And there’s no other way out for us.”
As I wrote at the time, despite their violent suppression, the protests of 2020 were a moment of hope for Belarus and its information climate: there was a sense that Lukashenko’s grip on the political narrative in the country was loosening, and that state TV was losing traction as a news source to Telegram and other forms of social media; for at least a brief moment, Lukashenko’s grip on the presidency itself seemed to wobble. Even by the time McPhedran wrote, however, this hope was receding. (“The magnitude of government repression has demoralized the opposition and independent reporters,” he wrote.) In the years since then, at least some independent journalism aimed at serving the people of Belarus has endured. But the story of press freedom in the country—one now inflected by its support of Russia’s war in neighboring Ukraine, as well as broader trends of transnational repression—has, if anything, gotten even bleaker, with no democratic breakthrough in sight.
Long after the 2020 protests had started to die down, the Belarusian authorities continued to mercilessly target independent journalism, detaining journalists, subjecting many of them to harsh sentences, and smearing whole outlets and groups as “extremist.” In December 2022, Larysa Shchyrakova was arrested for supposedly “discrediting” Belarus—even though she had publicly quit journalism several months earlier and become a photographer focused on traditional Belarusian culture. In May 2023, Rudzik, Putilo, and Protasevich received prison sentences ranging from eight to twenty years on a variety of charges.
Unlike the other two, who were sentenced in absentia, Protasevich was in Belarus to serve his eight-year term—but a few weeks later, he was pardoned. Not that even this was a clear victory for press freedom. As McPhedran had already noted, in the weeks after he was snatched from the Ryanair plane in 2021, the regime released videos of Protasevich—marks visible on his face and wrists—in which he supposedly confessed to crimes and stated a desire to start a new life; following the pardon in 2023, he was filmed vigorously praising Lukashenko. As the New York Times noted at the time, the filter of state propaganda media and cloak of secrecy around the treatment of political prisoners in Belarus made it hard to know whether he had genuinely renounced his past beliefs and opposition ties—but a “wide consensus” formed among opposition figures that Protasevich had betrayed and endangered them. “Please don’t praise him as a freedom fighter,” one implored the Times. “He is a very dark figure in this whole story.” Last year, Protasevich denied endangering any former colleagues in an interview with a Russian media personality, but seemed in a sense to agree that he was not a hero, suggesting that those promoting the idea that people should “heroically resist” had taken the easy way out by going into exile, and that all he stood to gain from refusing to cooperate with the regime was a “minute of glory” from the “opposition media” and “some alley in a mid-sized European city named after me.” He is now, apparently, working as a welder.
It’s true that many independent journalists have gone into exile—hundreds since the clampdown of 2020, per the BAJ. But they haven’t had it easy. A number went to Ukraine prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, which Belarus supported, including by allowing Russian troops to transit its territory; Ukraine subsequently placed sanctions on citizens of both countries, including exiled journalists. Following the invasion, at least one Belarusian journalist in Ukraine told Reporters Without Borders that he was staying put because he felt safer there than in his home country, despite Russian attacks. Others who had been exiled in Ukraine moved on to countries in the European Union, despite their tougher visa rules for Belarusians. And even these countries have not proved to be totally safe havens. Last year, a report by a coalition of research groups found that at least three members of Belarusian civil society, including the editor of an independent news site, had their phones hacked with Pegasus, a highly invasive Israeli-made spyware tool, between 2021 and 2023, while they were physically present in either Lithuania or Poland. Pegasus is deployed by state actors—but Belarus and Russia aren’t thought to have access to it. It’s not clear who was responsible.
While some exiled journalists have left the profession, others have continued to report. To some extent, journalism—or activities that look like it—has continued inside the country, too. After Russia invaded Ukraine, for example, a group sprang up on Telegram that used open-source and citizen-provided information to monitor Russian troop movements on Belarusian soil; Belarusians sent in reports “en masse, and the military command of Ukraine seriously relied on the data because it was reliable,” a deputy leader of the BAJ told Voice of America (though sending information became riskier when the regime declared the group to be “extremist” and jailed at least one contributor). For the most part, though, Lukashenko has the domestic media in his pocket, and has continued to this day to harshly crack down on those perceived as dissenting. Last summer, Lukashenko pardoned some political prisoners, including a handful of journalists, perhaps as part of a pre-election bid to soften his image—but at the same time, others were detained and/or sentenced. According to a prison census conducted by the Committee to Protect Journalists, thirty-one journalists were jailed in Belarus as of December 1 last year, the worst such figure in Europe (and one worse than Russia). Two weeks later, the regime arrested seven more journalists from the same outlet, in what the BAJ described as “an escalation of repressions.” Viasna, a human rights group, declared 2024 “the darkest and most repressive year” for Belarusian media.
Last year, journalists jailed in Russia made headlines when two of them—the American citizens Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and Alsu Kurmasheva, a staffer at the US-backed international broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty—were freed in the biggest prisoner swap with the West since the Cold War. Belarus appeared to be a party to the swap, releasing a German citizen it had detained—and yet no political prisoners or journalists were freed from Belarus in the deal. Among many others, this meant that two of Kurmasheva’s RFE/RL colleagues, Ihar Losik and Andrey Kuznechyk, would remain behind bars in the country; even though they worked for an outlet funded by US taxpayers, their continued detention got little attention in the West—likely a result, an RFE/RL representative told me at the time, of the fact that they are not US citizens. More broadly, the exiled Belarusian opposition—led by Tikhanovskaya, who fled to Lithuania in the hours following the 2020 election in which she challenged Lukashenko—was criticized for failing to make the release of prisoners a priority in its diplomatic dealings with the West, though Tikhanovskaya disputed this. Whatever the other reasons, it may also just have been the case that, as the Times put it, Belarus is widely viewed in the West as “an eccentric Russian puppet state” that “despite a sustained reign of terror, commands little attention in its own right.”
In the run-up to this year’s election, propaganda media in Belarus swung aggressively behind Lukashenko. Earlier this month, state TV ran a series of so-called interviews with Losik, Kuznechyk, and Ihar Karney, another journalist who has worked with RFE/RL, with the aim of portraying the outlet as extreme and bent on regime change. (Reporters Without Borders noted the series as it filed a pre-election complaint with the International Criminal Court alleging that Lukashenko has committed crimes against humanity.) On Sunday, Lukashenko cast his ballot at a polling place, then held an extraordinary four-hour televised press conference in an adjacent room. Rosenberg, of the BBC, challenged him on his jailing and exiling of critics; “some are in prison and some are in exile,” Lukashenko acknowledged, “but you are here,” and “prison is for people who have opened their mouths too wide.” When Rosenberg called the election “strange,” Lukashenko replied, “Steve, this is a whole new experience for you.” Many of the media workers present laughed and clapped.
Yesterday, Lukashenko was declared the winner of the election—with 87 percent of the vote, this time—but there were no mass protests; Tikhanovskaya led a march in Warsaw, but one of her advisers noted to Politico that there was little appetite for similar action inside the country since “people feel that the costs of protest increase while the benefits of protest decrease. They don’t see that right now their votes or their actions can change anything.” In the weeks after the 2020 election, Lukashenko visited a tractor plant and was heckled by workers. When he visited the automobile plant recently, according to Rosenberg, workers there presented Lukashenko with an ax, and he promised to try it out.
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, tech stocks tumbled on news that DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence firm that is relatively obscure in the US, had created an AI model that appears to match those made by American companies like OpenAI and Google in terms of power but at a fraction of the cost—a potentially seismic development in the AI business. The impact of DeepSeek’s breakthrough remains unclear for now, but various observers have suggested that it upends assumptions about China’s strength in the global AI race. Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the Times, notes, meanwhile, that the potential widespread adoption of DeepSeek’s chatbot in the US seems likely to raise concerns about data privacy and censorship, with users already noticing that DeepSeek models won’t talk about things the Chinese government deems sensitive.
- Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, is finally set to hold her first formal press briefing at lunchtime today, more than a week after Trump took office. (Trump, of course, has spoken with the press himself multiple times in that period.) In recent days, Trump has moved to round out his White House’s press operation by making multiple hires, including that of Alex Pfeiffer as principal deputy communications director; per NPR’s David Folkenflik, Pfeiffer is at least the twentieth person with ties to Fox to enter the administration, having previously worked as a producer on Tucker Carlson’s show. And, on the subject of Carlson, his son Buckley is also reported to be joining the administration: as a deputy press secretary to Vice President Vance.
- In Friday’s newsletter, amid a major shake-up at CNN, we noted the uncertain future of Jim Acosta, a journalist and leading antagonist of Trump during his first term who was moved out of his morning slot and reportedly offered a show at midnight; now Oliver Darcy reports, for Status, that Acosta is expected to leave the network. In other TV-news news, Chris Stirewalt, the political editor of NewsNation, will take on the same role at The Hill. (Both outlets are owned by Nexstar.) And the CBS Evening News debuted a new format and roster of hosts last night after Norah O’Donnell signed off as anchor of the newscast last week; Poynter’s Tom Jones has a review.
- Journalists across England and Wales will have greater access to proceedings in family courts starting this week, following the successful rollout of a pilot scheme that showed minors’ anonymity can be respected. According to PA Media, the new rules will allow “accredited journalists and legal bloggers to report on cases as they unfold, as they would in criminal courts, provided the families and certain professionals involved remain anonymous”—though “judges may still decide some cases may not be reported on, or that reporting should be postponed in certain circumstances.”
- And The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg profiled Stimulation Clicker, an online game, designed by a young programmer named Neal Agarwal, that aims to reenact the evolution of the internet and parody what it is like to use it today by nightmarishly overlaying content and tasks. “The game ingeniously re-creates the paradox of the modern internet: Individually, the components are enjoyable. But collectively, they are unbearable,” Rosenberg writes. “When everything on the internet demands attention, paying attention to anything becomes impossible.”
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