In a field behind a Polish business park an insurrection is brewing. A group of exiles — electricians and factory workers, young and old — don balaclavas, load dummy assault rifles and crawl through the undergrowth.
“My daughter doesn’t know I am here. I told her I was going paintballing,” says “Predator”, a 42-year old female volunteer at the session in Poznan. But her motive is clear: “I came here today . . . to prepare for the fight for Belarus.”
In 2020, more than a million Belarusians took to the streets to protest against results of an election — widely considered to be rigged — in the largest challenge to President Lukashenko’s regime since he rose to power after the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Three years later a Stalinesque campaign of torture and detention has all but silenced dissent in the nation of 9.2 million. Lukashenko’s most important ally has brought war back to Europe and put Belarus on a global geopolitical faultline.
Last week President Putin deployed tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, the first time Russia had stationed warheads beyond their borders since Soviet times.
Lukashenko, 68, crowed over the arrival of warheads “three times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki”, but western analysts and Belarusian opposition figures see the move as Lukashenko selling what little remains of Belarus’s sovereignty to the Kremlin in return for Russia propping up his regime.
In Moscow, Sergei Karaganov, Putin’s top political scientist, proposed a nuclear strike on Poland on the grounds that no sane American president would retaliate and risk sacrificing “say, Boston for, say, Poznan”.
Yet in Poznan, Belarusians forced to flee their country seemed unbothered by the spectre of nuclear war.
Instead they are actively preparing for the day, dubbed “Time X”, when they will return to their country to take on the regime.
“We tried the peaceful route,” said “Grandad”, an electrician in his sixties who recently recovered from a heart attack after the stress of starting a life from scratch in Poland last year. “[But] never has a state won its freedom without blood.”
The combat training session was organised by Bypol, a group of former officers from Belarus’s security services who defected from the regime during the protests of 2020.
This session is the first of its kind in Poznan, but other groups have been training in Poland for months with recruits numbering in the hundreds, according to Aliaksandr Azarau, the leader of Bypol.
“I call it a militant diaspora,” said “Starling”, the instructor and a former serviceman. “Our strength is growing each day, meanwhile, as far as we know, people are leaving the regime’s [forces.]”
Starling was guarding a polling station in 2020 at the time of the election: “I saw with my own eyes how people voted for Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya [the opposition leader] and then saw a result that didn’t correspond with that.”
Nevertheless, Lukashenko gave security forces “carte blanche” to disperse the crowds. “He told them, ‘If we don’t hold them off, they will hang us from the rafters.’”
Starling believes the protests were unsuccessful in 2020 because they were no match for the well-trained and well-armed security forces. Next time things will be different.
The group of eight novices in the Poznan field pointing practice weapons, while unwitting weekenders blast rave music from a nearby truck, seems a long way from becoming a guerrilla army.
However, Bypol deserves to be taken seriously. As many as 200,000 willing participants in Belarus and in exile have risked imprisonment to sign up to their plan peremoha or “victory plan”.
In the summer of 2021, Bypol began the programme from exile in Warsaw, inviting Belarusians unhappy with Lukashenko’s regime to register interest on an anonymous Telegram “bot” or automated form, explain any special skills they might have and wait for the signal to strike.
Guerrilla fighters and partisans linked to Bypol have already conducted small successful operations in Belarus.
They sabotaged railways carrying Russian troops to Ukraine last spring and in February this year Bypol claimed responsibility for blowing up a Russian reconnaissance plane at an airport near Minsk with two small drones.
Bypol has been labelled an “extremist organisation” in Belarus and anyone linked to the plan, or alleged to have signed up to it, faces torture and imprisonment if caught. They have stopped inviting participants but still run existing operatives.
The security infrastructure arrayed against them is both formidable and sinister. Unlike its Russian counterpart, Belarus’s brutal internal intelligence service still calls itself the KGB, while GUBOPiK, the organisation that specialises in repressing political dissidents, is reportedly referred to even by its own members as the “Gestapo”.
Videos posted to Telegram channels linked to GUBOPik feature “confession” scenes where the detained are humiliated. In some cases they are forced to clutch dildos or wear rave goggles to suggest homosexuality.
A tyre factory worker who confesses to sharing “extremist material” and promises not to do it again is forced to clutch a portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky, friend of Lenin and first leader of the Cheka, the early-Soviet secret police that orchestrated the murderous Red Terror.
Tsikhanouskaya said that Belarusian people who think like her were waiting for their moment. “We’re in safe mode, like a computer, our main task is to protect people and keep them where they are,” she explained, at her glass and steel headquarters on the outskirts of Vilnius, Lithuania.
The former English teacher and mother of two ran for president in her husband Siarhei’s place after he was detained in May 2020. She believes Lukashenko allowed her to run only to humiliate her — a misogynistic gamble that backfired.
In her view, Belarus faces two crises: a humanitarian crisis for political prisoners — her husband included — who face torture and isolation in prison; and a crisis of sovereignty as Lukashenko, desperate to cling to power, allows the state organs to become more and more entwined with Russia’s military imperialist machine.
“We worry, not worry exactly, but are on guard that Belarus could become some form of consolation prize for Putin,” said Tsikhanouskaya.
Belarus and Russia have been bound as a “Union State” since 1999, but opposition figures fear the movement of nuclear weapons into the country is the latest step in a stealth occupation by Putin, especially as his plan to take Ukraine has faltered.
“The presence of nuclear weapons in Belarus is like an anchor from Russia. They’ve latched on to us now. What next? How can we get rid of them?” she said.
Months have passed since Tsikhanouskaya last had evidence that her imprisoned husband was still alive. She is not alone.
There are 1,492 political prisoners in Belarus, according to the human rights organisation Viasna (meaning “spring”). The authorities boast on state television of making 700 home raids every four weeks against alleged enemies of the regime.
Pavel Sapelka, a human rights lawyer for Viasna, was on the receiving end of one of them.
“It was very peculiar,” he said. “The door shook. It rattled. We opened the door. Then soldiers in special [forces] uniform with machineguns shoved themselves in.” The next day he saw a clip of the interior of his flat broadcast on the main government news channel, with his documents and cash strewn over the floor. It was then he knew it was time to flee, with his wife, to Lithuania.
More than 3,500 websites and Telegram channels are on the list of “extremist materials” in Belarus. Mikalai Klimovych, 61, was sentenced to 12 months in prison, despite a heart condition, for “contempt of the president of Belarus” after liking a caricature of Lukashenko on a social media site. He died in Vitebsk prison colony No 3 on May 8.
Uladzimir Vialichkin, 63, has been detained up to four times a year since co-founding Viasna in 1996. His last time in detention was three years ago.
“In my room, with the area of 20 square metres, there were 35 people, two lay under each bed because there was no space even on the floor,” he said.
His friend Ales Bialiatski, who won the Nobel peace prize last year, was sentenced to ten years in a penal colony on March 3 on implausible charges of smuggling and financing political protests. Knowing some of his staff had already been imprisoned, he chose not to flee.
“The captain went down with his ship,” said Vialichkin over a coffee, looking out at the Lithuanian rain.
Seasoned human rights campaigners believe the situation in their homeland is likely to get worse before it gets better — death by firing squad, a favourite punishment of the Red Terror, was never outlawed in Belarus.
As the war in Ukraine enters a new phase to the south, the people of Belarus could yet play a key role in the outcome.
“Tos”, a young man with a hesitant voice in Poznan, wants to be ready for that day.
“Whether we are ready or not, there will be a moment when the Russian federation leaves,” he said from behind his balaclava. “Then we’ll be ready to enter.
“I am sure that even people without any training will stand up and fight.”
