The Belarusian diaspora mobilizes for Ukraine – Mariya Sysoi

Since 2020, hundreds of Belarusians who fled abroad have developed an aid network to help their compatriots. All these already existing initiatives made it possible to use this experience to help Ukraine.

Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko is Russia’s ally in the aggression of Ukraine and Belarus is to all intents and purposes a country under foreign occupation, in which any public expression of protest is punished with arrests, beatings and criminal prosecutions. Some stories, however, help distinguish the majority of Belarusians, who support Ukrainians, from the minority of supporters of Lukashenko, the man who lost the elections in 2020 and who persists in clinging to power by force.

At the front
Among the Belarusians who want to help Ukraine there are those who decide to go to fight and tell it by asking to remain anonymous. “I’m Dub (Oak tree in Belarusian), a Belarusian volunteer, ”says a man in Kiev. He is in his forties and has been living in Ukraine for four months.

“In Belarus, the company I worked for fired me because of my political views. The authorities started persecuting me and so I was forced to leave and I found refuge in Ukraine. I fell in love with this country and its people, and I have decided that it is my duty to defend this wonderful and hospitable nation in the same way that I would defend the Belarusian people, because we are united in the face of the same great evil, we have the same enemy ”.

Dub is part of the patriotic military organization “White Legion”, which was incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard and participates in the defense of Kiev. A Belarusian battalion is also part of it.

“If Europe and the whole world had reacted more strongly to the 2020 situation in Belarus, instead of just barely expressing their concern, this situation might not have happened. Evil must be stopped immediately, before it becomes stronger. Living in ‘peaceful’ Belarus is more dangerous than fighting here ”.

Activist Zmicer Zavadski gathers the volunteers. In 2021 he left Belarus under threat of arrest and went to Kiev. Later he moved to Germany and from there he coordinates the supply of the necessary equipment to the Belarusians on the front line: bulletproof vests, helmets, night vision goggles, communication devices.

Activists believe that there are currently around two hundred Belarusian volunteers in Ukraine. Yet in the first two weeks of the war alone, more than a thousand have applied to the Warsaw Recruiting Center and are now waiting to be sent to the front.

We meet Kasia (the name has been changed) in the center of Warsaw, where the Palace of Culture and Science is illuminated in yellow and blue. She is a linguist in her early thirties and spent eighteen months as a volunteer in a country in the Middle East where there was a war going on. That’s where she received medical training.

“When you have received this training, in a certain sense you have an obligation, you can not do anything”. Kasia’s colleagues, her acquaintances, but also complete strangers helped her to collect everything a doctor needs at the front: equipment for intubation, for artificial ventilation, pulse oximeters, stretchers, tourniquets, splints, bandages, dressings, plasters, saline, medicines. When we met her Kasia she was waiting for the delivery of the last packages and she was preparing to leave.

The welcome
Then there are those who help at the border, those who collect and distribute tons of humanitarian aid, those who find accommodation for refugees or those who, again, take care of the education of young Ukrainians.

One of the refugee reception centers is located in the Polish village of Dołhobyczów, not far from the border with Ukraine. Approximately every quarter of an hour, the minibuses of the border service arrive carrying women and children.

One of the volunteers is Oksana Bukina. On the first day of the war, she asked on the “Belarusian women in Wroclaw” chat if anyone was willing to help with accommodation, money or as a volunteer. Dozens of people responded. At the same time she posted on social networks that she would help organize the transport of refugees out of Ukraine and receive them at the Polish border.

“We hardly slept for days. I remember we went to bed at three in the morning and at six or seven the phone started ringing and we had to answer. It would have been nice to switch off and rest, but when there are real people who are bombed and write to you, they ask for your help… “.

Oksana and some Belarusians she knew started volunteering in the shelters. Many have taken vacation. Vitalik came from Germany, others came from Breslau, seven or eight hours away. Oksana says civilian volunteers were initially not allowed in refugee camps.

“Vitalik spent the first three days in his car near the pitch, helping, giving directions, finding passages. At that moment the refugees were taken out of the camp: they rested, ate something, washed and left, to a new country whose language they did not know, the opportunities for them were very few. Vitalik was simply a volunteer helping refugees who didn’t know where to go. The leaders of the camp saw what he was doing and let him work in their centers ”.

Oksana is now unemployed. In Belarus you worked in education. In 2020 she was arrested during a demonstration, criminal proceedings were initiated against her, but she managed to flee to Ukraine.

“I too am a refugee, I have asked for international protection. I had fled Belarus with my son, we had nothing. We arrived in Kiev and there they welcomed us with open arms. They collected sheets and pillows for us, dishes and clothes. They gave us all the support we needed and brought us loads of food! Some told their colleagues, others their neighbors, and people wrote to us, phoned us and helped us ”.

After moving to Wroclaw, Oksana started working on a startup together with some Ukrainian developers, but the war ended it all.

One month into the war, Oksana continues to volunteer. Now he is looking after the children at the Wrocław station, where a room has been set up so that mothers can leave their children while they deal with organizational matters.

International aid
Warsaw, Mokotów district. We are in the FreeShop Partyzanka warehouse: huge rooms are literally inundated with clothes, shoes, diaper packs and other basic necessities. A few dozen volunteers are sorting out the piles of clothing: coats and skirts, clothes for children, women and men. Ukrainians continually enter the warehouse to get what they need. There is a group of eight volunteers who take care of the whole operation

The coordinator is Eleena Markevich. We talk about her in the “office”, a tiny room where some team members slept for the first week in sleeping bags on mattresses on the floor.

“Bad luck brings people together. People from Warsaw (Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, Turks, Russians) bring us gifts all the time. In the early days people called every minute and I told them what we needed and what we didn’t need. The Belarusian communities abroad also immediately joined us. People from other countries send us packages, rent minibuses. We just got a delivery of personal care items from six vans. We have received phone calls from organizations in Germany, Norway, the Netherlands and Georgia who have offered us cooperation and assistance. We have been in contact with many of them for some time ”.

The members of the FreeShop Partyzanka team do not receive any salaries, only donations. For Elena, however, it has been a full-time job for the past eighteen months, ever since the protests following the presidential election in Belarus in 2020. She had already lived in Poland for several years.

“I remember how shocked we were when the persecutions in Minsk began. We organized protest rallies in central Warsaw and we didn’t know what to do. The only thing that was clear to us was that a flood of people would come and need help. We were able to see the state the Belarusians were in when they arrived here. They clearly suffered from post-traumatic stress. I still have flashbacks every time I meet Ukrainians ”.

The center of Warsaw
Two flags fly over the building where Solidarność was located in 1989: the Ukrainian yellow-blue and the Belarusian white-red-white. A Belarusian youth center has recently opened here. It offers a space for cultural and educational activities, a real breath of fresh air for Belarusians who have been forced to leave their home. Here they can study in Belarusian, theater groups and choirs can rehearse, concerts and parlor games are also held.

The center also helps Belarusians to find accommodation and integrate into Polish society. He is currently engaged in the relocation and accommodation of people who have fled Ukraine. The director of the center, Aliaksandr Lapko, tells me that in the first week the volunteers stayed on site.

“Strong relationships have already been created between Belarusians. 2020 was for us the year in which we began to organize ourselves. More than twenty Belarusian organizations in various Polish cities have been activated. Now we all work together, ”says Aliaksandr.

More than fifty volunteers use chat rooms and social networks to look for places where refugees can live, agree with hotels for free accommodation and turn to churches. Parishioners are asked to leave their contact details and the parish then passes them on to the volunteers.

“The first wave of solidarity is extremely intense and must be exploited to the maximum. The Belarusians are well aware that the topic will begin to disappear from the headlines, but the problem will remain and will continue to grow ”.

A Ukrainian flag hangs on virtually every door on Oleandrów Street in Warsaw. The Belarusian Solidarity Center is located here, the contacts of the center are in the leaflets distributed at the information points for refugees in the railway stations

A year ago, a free school was opened for Belarusian children. As soon as the war began, director Helena Rodzina realized that similar groups would be needed for Ukrainian children.

“The children are here from 9 to 15, each group has its own teacher, all volunteer Ukrainian women who had to leave their country due to the war. Volunteer teachers of Polish and English, music and drawing also come. Children have lunch here and go on trips. There are currently three groups of children in the school, 25 children in all. The youngest Ukrainian child is three, the oldest twelve. We would like to enroll more children, so we are looking for suitable places and financial support ”.

“Ukrainian children received psychological help. Those who arrived from Belarus after 2020 were traumatized. For the first week they drew riot police in their big black uniforms, along with blood, wounded arms and heads… It was horrible. Now the Ukrainian children are all drawing yellow and blue flags, even if no one told them to do it, they just gave them paper and colored pencils ”.

(Translation by Silvia Arseni)