Belarusian sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya came to Tokyo with dreams of Olympic glory, a chance to turn years of training into the once-in-a-lifetime jubilation of a podium appearance, maybe even a gold medal. But as the Summer Olympics wind to a close, the 24-year-old finds herself in exile in Warsaw, afraid to return to her homeland, fearful of what Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko has in store for her.
Tsimanouskaya’s whirlwind journey from Tokyo to Warsaw began with a simple expression of free speech — she criticized how Belarusian officials were managing the track team. Belarusian officials whisked her off to a Tokyo airport, she said, and tried to forcibly board her on a plane to Istanbul. Tsimanouskaya refused, sought the protection of Japanese airport security, and with the help of Western governments, flew to Vienna and then Warsaw.
It’s easy to see why Tsimanouskaya dreads a fate in Lukashenko’s hands.
On Aug. 3, Belarusian antigovernment activist Vitaly Shishov, 26, was found dead in Kyiv, hanged in a park after going out for a morning jog. Police are investigating whether his death was a murder disguised as a suicide, and Lukashenko critics believe the authoritarian leader is behind the death. In May, Lukashenko dispatched a fighter jet to force the landing of a Ryanair jetliner flying from Athens to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. When the plane landed in Minsk, Belarus’ capital, Belarusian authorities arrested one of the passengers, Roman Protasevich, a 26-year-old Belarusian journalist whose online media outlet had been critical of Lukashenko’s government. Western leaders denounced the act as nothing less than air piracy. They were right.
The world has its share of despots, and Lukashenko is a platinum card-carrying member. Since 1994, the man known as “Europe’s last dictator” has ruled over the former Soviet republic with a thuggish disregard for rule of law and human rights. Elections are shams, and when opposition activists and citizens protest rigged results, Lukashenko brutally cracks down with truncheons and mass arrests, as he did after the fraudulent elections of 2020 that kept him in power. Authorities jailed as many as 35,000 people, and many others fled to other countries to live in exile.
Lukashenko doesn’t lose any sleep over what the Western world thinks of him. That’s because he has as an economic and political lifeline in Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has on his resume his own list of extraterritorial killings and anti-West chicanery. The U.S. still bears scars from Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and the world hasn’t forgotten the assassination of anti-Putin dissident and ex-Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko (poisoned by polonium-laced tea in London in 2006), and the attempt on the life of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal (survived nerve agent poisoning in the U.K. in 2018). In both cases, British authorities blamed the Putin regime.
After Protasevich’s arrest, Western leaders howled about Lukashenko’s actions. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanded Protasevich’s immediate release. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, called the skyjacking “outrageous and illegal behavior” and said Lukashenko and his regime “have to understand that this will have severe consequences.”
And then? Yes, the U.S. joined Britain, Canada and the European Union in imposing a raft of sanctions on the Lukashenko regime, including hits on Belarus’ banking, oil, and tobacco industries, as well as its potash exports, a key component of the country’s economy. But as he has done with past punishments, Lukashenko showed no sign of flinching.
Instead, he has pursued trumped-up charges against Protasevich, Ukrainian investigators are scrutinizing a possible link between his regime and Shishov’s death, and he has added to his target list a Belarusian athlete whose only pursuit was to, through grit and sweat, put her best out on the track at Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium. That dream is gone, and Tsimanouskaya now must ponder whether she’ll ever return to her native country, and whether Lukashenko will set his sights on her parents, who still live in Belarus.
Western leaders cannot let up on the Lukashenko regime. If “Europe’s last dictator” doesn’t change his ways, tougher, broader sanctions should come next. It would be easy to write off Belarus as a faraway problem, but people suffering and dying at the hands of oppressive regimes should be treated as an urgent, universal priority — one that Chicagoans and citizens across the globe should care about. Lukashenko may never understand that, but the U.S. and the rest of the world must.
— Chicago Tribune
