“No Deals with a Cannibal”
On Political Prisoners in Belarus
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Natal'ia Dulina was a lecturer of Italian at Minsk’s University of Linguistics. When hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets following the fraud in the August 2020 presidential elections, she also participated in the protests and a strike by university professors. As a result, she was initially dismissed from the university and later sentenced to several 14-day periods of arrest. In October 2022, she was arrested and six months later sentenced to three and a half years of imprisonment in a camp for supporting an extremist organization. Her offense: She had given an interview to the radio station Euroradio, which was declared an extremist organization two weeks after the interview. On June 21, 2025, she was taken to Lithuania by the Belarusian authorities along with twelve other political prisoners. In the interview, she talks about the reasons for her protest, the unlawful conditions of detention, the circumstances of her release, which for her was tantamount to deportation – and about her encounter with Maria Kolesnikova.
(Osteuropa 6-7/2025, pp. 5–14)