Silent sisters: how Belarusian women turned prison into the frontline of resistance against Lukashenka’s regime

Since coming to power in 1994, the Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenka has liked to describe himself as a “women's president”. Behind the slogan lies a shrewd political strategy. To focus on women is to focus on voters who tend to have money worries and a dependance on the state, notes Nasta Zakharevich in New Eastern Europe. The allegiance of Belarusian women to the Minsk regime may be patchy, she says, but it “simplifies the task” of those in power. “Genuine support from even a fraction of the electorate simplifies his task. It allows for less money and administrative resources to be spent on falsification and for mitigating the impacts of dishonest elections.”

Five years after unprecedented protests following yet another egregious electoral fraud, the repression continues, explains sociologist Henadz Korshunau in the same article. The same Lukashenko is credited with the phrase “the Constitution is not written for women”, which illustrates a paternalism that is also evident in labour laws and the restriction of reproductive rights. Women are “structural units intended to enhance the country’s demographic situation, rather than [they are] political subjects”, says Korshunau. Meanwhile, the Belarusian Women's Union continues to broadcast its support for the regime: “We are our president's team”, it proclaims.

According to Zakharevich, women's support for Lukashenko is due less to their adherence to authoritarian rule than to “gender socialisation within a patriarchal society”. Women tend to trust in the “strong hands of the president”, having been persuaded to value the regime's positive aspects and to ignore its abuses. Polling stations are often located in schools, and it is mostly their female staff – low-income teachers – who are coerced to fudge the results. One woman teacher who refused to stuff the ballot boxes was told by the headteacher, serving as president of the polling station, that she “should not be dismissed, but [rather] executed”.

Yet, as Nasta Zakharevich points out, it was women who took the lead in the 2020 demonstrations. From being mere “legs of the opposition”, they became the face of the protests. In the front line were figures such as Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Maria Kalesnikava, and Veronika Tsepkalo. The authorities retaliated with mass arrests. Women were imprisoned, where they suffered threats and violence.

Female detainees are often refused mattresses, blankets, pillows or sheets, in violation of the law. Some have discovered that they were sterile on their release, writes Zakharevich. In January 2025, a commission of independent human-rights experts, commissioned by the UN, condemned the conditions of women in these penal colonies. It denounced the system’s “inhuman and degrading nature”.

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It was women who took the lead in the 2020 demonstrations. From being mere “legs of the opposition”, they became the face of the protests

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While Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and Veronika Tsepkalo were able to find refuge abroad, the same cannot be said for Maria Kalesnikava. A year after her arrest in September 2020, she was sentenced to eleven years in a penal colony. Kalesnikava is one of Belarus's 1,177 political prisoners, as counted by the human-rights NGO Viasna. They include 178 women and around 40 journalists of both genders.

On 21 June 2025, following a visit to Minsk by Donald Trump's special representative, Keith Kellogg, the regime released 14 political prisoners on “humanitarian grounds”. They included Sergei Tikhanovsky, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya's husband. He joined his wife in Vilnius, Lithuania.

“Ranking among the world's largest prisons for journalists, Belarus stands out for the high number of women journalists behind bars”, observes Reporters Without Borders (RSF). Those women include “Katsiaryna Andreyeva, sentenced first to two years in prison in February 2021 for filming an unauthorized demonstration, then to eight years in 2022 for 'high treason', and Maryna Zolatava, editor-in-chief of the leading independent media outlet, Tut.by”. RSF believes this development “marks the end of a certain traditional patriarchal indulgence on the part of the Belarusian authorities, [who were] surprised by the predominant role played by women in the post-election protest movements”.

For many female inmates, particularly those of child-bearing age, prison can represent a double punishment. For Zerkalo, Zlata Tsvetkova gathered poignant testimonies from several such prisoners who fear that it will be too late to start a family and rebuild their social lives once they are released. 

Darya, who spent three years in a penal colony, was one of them: “The girls in my group, who were aged between 25 and 27 and still had ten years to serve, feared that once they were out, they would find it difficult to start a happy family, ” she told Tsvetkova. “It's not easy to give birth to a child when you still have to find someone to have it with”, she laments. Another, Tatyana, who spent two and a half years in prison, observes that “in Belarus, the issue of women in prison is generally taboo. If you end up in prison, you automatically become someone who cannot be a good mother, a good person, and it's as if you have no right to a family or personal happiness.”

As Zlata Tsvetkova points out, this is a real generational prejudice: many women arrive in prison still fertile and leave unable to become mothers. Women become victims of a regime which, in the words of independent outlet Novy Chas, “after imprisoning them, leaves those it has broken to die”.

Novy Chas notes the case of former political prisoner Anna Kandratsenka, who died destitute on 5 February at the age of 39 as a result of cancer she had developed in the Gomel women's penal colony. In an article for Mediazona Belarus, three former political prisoners recount life in this same prison. Despite the strict prohibitions imposed by the prison administration, the ex-detainees report that they forged relationships that proved vital to their survival.

Such bonds, built through gestures of support from the moment of the prisoners' arrival, “are perceived as threats within the prison regime, and so solidarity is broken by the forced dispersal of inmates”, notes the newspaper. There is also a ban on the sharing of food or other objects, and indeed on any other form of support.

The bonds forged in prison are so strong that, after their release, former inmates continue to nurture them. They may visit detainees, exchange coded messages with them, or provide them with material support. Unsurprisingly, such women are perceived by the regime as deeply subversive. This “silent resistance”, hardened by the experience of prison, is described in Gazeta.by by Ksenia Lutskina, a now-exiled journalist and former detainee, as “the most terrible army in the world”.

Will the Belarusian regime answer to the law for these abuses? That is one ambition of the Belarusian Women's Foundation. As well as campaigning against gender violence, it is fighting for a feminist political response to Lukashenko's abuse of power. In particular, it works to support female political prisoners still in prison. Based in Riga, Latvia, the foundation is endeavouring to document the many attestations of abuse from Belarus’s women prisoners and ex-prisoners. It hopes to use this testimony in future proceedings before the International Criminal Court.