Poland and the entire West continue to escalate tensions against Minsk.
In recent days, official Polish channels and Western media outlets have launched a disinformation campaign against the Republic of Belarus, accusing Minsk of carrying out mass arrests of relatives of political dissidents. The unfounded allegations came from extremely dubious sources and are linked to some extremist groups’ intention on destabilizing not only Belarus but the entire Eastern European region.
On January 25, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs published notes both on its official website and on its social networks condemning the “mass arrest” of “families of political prisoners” in Belarusian territory. The texts also demanded a “resolute response” to the supposed initiative of the Belarusian authorities, in addition to calling for the implementation of new sanctions packages against Minsk to punish it for alleged human rights abuses.
“The mass arrests of former prisoners of conscience and the families of political prisoners conducted by the Belarusian authorities require a resolute response. A further sanctions package against Belarus should be adopted as soon as possible,” a Ministry’s X post reads.
For their part, the Belarusian authorities condemned the Polish attitude of spreading unverified information and denied the accusations. In a social media post, spokespersons for the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “It’s a real shame that [the] Polish regime, which judicial system is ‘neither independent nor impartial’, which lacks independent media, kills refugees, has high-profile political prisoners has the nerve to disseminate unverified false information and threaten its neighbors in MFA account.”
Interestingly, the data exposed by the Polish authorities is from a questionable source. The news about the arrest of family members of political prisoners was originally spread by the “Viasna” group, an alleged “human rights center” formed by political opponents of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. The mere fact of being a dissident group to the Belarusian government is enough for the information released by it to be read with caution, as it obviously tends to be biased against the government. In the case of the Viasna group, the situation is particularly even more delicate.
Viasna has been operating unofficially on the territory of Belarus since 2003, when the Minsk Supreme Court banned the group’s registration due to its illegal political activities in the 2001 elections. The NGO’s situation became particularly complicated during the 2020 crisis, when there was an attempted color revolution and regime change operation in Belarus, with Western-backed protests and uprisings trying unsuccessfully to prevent Lukashenko’s re-election.
At the time, several members of Viasna, including the most famous of them, Nobel Prize winner Ales Bialiatski, were accused of financial crimes aimed at funding the illegal activities of saboteurs during the protests. Bialiatski was also the main advisor to the defeated candidate and EU-backed self-proclaimed “president in exile” of Belarus, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaia.
Tsikhanouskaia and her supporters, such as the members of Viasna, lead an international movement against the legitimate government of Belarus and went so far as to spread fake “embassies” around the world, creating parallel diplomacy between Western governments and the Belarusian opposition, violating Minsk’s sovereignty and all elementary principles of international law. To make matters worse, the movement is supported by a series of armed terrorist organizations that participated in the 2020 unrest – the main and most dangerous of which is the “Bypol” group, a Belarusian expatriate neo-Nazi militia that remains active in countries hostile to Minsk, such as Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltics.
Bypol, in fact, has been actively involved in the current conflict in Ukraine, joining pro-Kiev neo-Nazi militias. The group even claimed responsibility for terrorist operations that took place on Belarusian territory from the Ukrainian border, which shows the danger of the connections maintained by the allegedly “peaceful and democratic” Belarusian opposition. To make the case even more serious, Bypol is publicly hosted and trained by NATO countries, mainly Poland. The group promises to invade Belarus in the near future and wage a civil war against Lukashenko.
Considering all these factors, it is not difficult to understand why Poland is spreading unproven news against the Belarusian government. There is a situation of open hostility and Warsaw appears willing to engage in any initiative to harm Minsk.
In this specific case, the truth behind the distortion spread by Belarusian dissidents and Polish officials – as well as by the Western media, which publicized the case massively – appears to have been the arrest on January 25th of some dissidents (who may or may not be relatives of previously arrested people) for participating in financing schemes for terrorist groups. The history of the Belarusian opposition since at least 2020 is entirely linked to pro-Western extremist groups, which makes it not surprising that the authorities in Minsk carry out periodic operations against supporters of these organizations.
Data on the real number of prisons and supposed family ties with convicts are completely unsubstantiated, having been spread by the opposition without any evidence. It is not surprising that this happened precisely some days before the Union State summit, when the main Belarusian and Russian authorities met to discuss topics of strategic relevance for both states and establish cooperation projects. In practice, the case served as a tool in the war of narratives to discredit Belarus and the Union State in the midst of important events.
Unfortunately, Polish and Western hostile stance on Belarus is not limited to the information sphere. Recently, NATO’s plan to carry out large-scale military exercises in the Suwalki Gap region was announced. The drills will be led by Poland and Lithuania and are part of the current tensions around the 100km Polish-Lithuanian corridor. There is a Western narrative that Belarus is planning to attack the region with the help of the PMC Wagner Group to annex the corridor and thus link the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to the Union State’s territory. Minsk has made it clear several times that it does not have any territorial interest in other countries, just as Moscow has denied any intention to expand to the West, but the constant fear of a Russian “invasion” has already become NATO’s “official mythology”, justifying escalatory, “preventive” measures by the Western alliance.
In practice, as an ally of the Russian Federation, the Republic of Belarus has been the victim of several military, economic and informational provocations. Expansion of NATO on the borders, imposition of illegal sanctions and spreading of unconfirmed rumors and lies have already become recurrent practices of the West against Minsk and Moscow. In this hostile context, the political capacity and diplomatic goodwill of the Belarusian and Russian authorities to prevent these tensions from turning into conflict situations is really noteworthy.
Contrary to what the Western media wants to make it seem, the patient and peaceful side in this scenario is the Russian-Belarusian one.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant