Vitali Chychov, head of a Belarusian NGO helping those who fled the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, was found hanged in a park in Kiev, Ukraine, Tuesday (August 3rd).
According to local police, the Belarusian national had been missing since the day before, when he went out for a jog. ” Vitali Chychov was found hanged (…) near the place where he lived “, she said in a statement. A murder investigation has been opened because, in the eyes of the investigators, it would be a “Murder camouflaged as suicide”.
According to members of his NGO, Belarusian House, “There is no doubt” that Vitali Chychov, aged 26 and exiled in Ukraine since the massive demonstrations of opponents in 2020, was assassinated by the Belarusian regime. On the NGO’s Telegram channel, consulted by Agence France-Presse, we can read:
“This is an operation planned by members of the security service to liquidate [une personne] truly dangerous for the Belarusian regime. Vitali was being watched and the police [ukrainienne] had been notified. We had been warned on several occasions, both by local sources and by people in Belarus, of all kinds of provocations including kidnapping and liquidation. “
Fast-paced searches, arrests and imprisonments
Ukraine, like Poland and Lithuania, has historically welcomed Belarusian exiles – opponents, members of NGOs, journalists or activists – fleeing this former Soviet republic. The fifth presidential term of Alexander Lukashenko, fraudulently won in 2020, and the massive repression of protest demonstrations have accelerated this phenomenon. Vitali Chychov himself left his country for Ukraine after participating in the protest in the city of Gomel.
In recent months, searches, sometimes spectacular arrests and imprisonments have followed one another at a breakneck pace.
- In May, the opponent Roman Protassevich was arrested after the hijacking of his commercial flight to Minsk.
- In early July, Viktor Babaryko, former banker and main rival of Alexander Lukashenko, in prison since August 2020, was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for corruption.
- In July, a series of searches and arrests targeted the independent and opposition press. Eleven students and a professor received heavy prison terms for demonstrating against the regime. Two researchers, who had participated in various research projects funded by Europe were arrested, without knowing the charges against them.
The regime’s latest targets are those that Alexander Lukashenko calls the “Dirty NGOs” cultivating ” terror “. Several dozen of them were liquidated by order of the Belarusian government. According to the NGO Viasna, itself concerned, these are organizations for the defense of human rights, language teaching, assistance to the disabled or employment assistance for young people, as well as the Belarusian Journalists Association and the Belarusian Bureau of PEN, the Association for the Defense of Writers.