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Since the Belarusian opposition leader Maria Kolesnikova disappeared on Monday, September 7, the Belarusian authorities have not released any information about her condition. Kolesnikova’s disappearance came a day after 100,000 people in Minsk protested for the fourth consecutive weekend against the outcome of the August 9 elections and demanded the resignation of President Lukashenko. The Belarusian Interior Ministry said 633 people had been arrested.
Kolesnikova’s lawyer, Lyudmila Kazak, met with her at a detention center in Minsk on Wednesday and let her know that she was incarcerated on suspicion of attempted coup. On Thursday morning, Kazak issued a statement written by the activist in local media accusing the Belarusian secret services of kidnapping her and threatening her with death. In the same document, Kolesnikova requests that an investigation be opened into the violence she has suffered, declaring herself willing to testify, also indicating the names and roles of the agents who allegedly committed the crimes.
In her statement, Kolesnikova reconstructs what has happened since her disappearance on September 7: she says that after being abducted from the street in Minsk, she was told that if she did not leave Belarus they would take her out of the country “alive or in pieces”. Or that she would be imprisoned for 25 years. During this first detention, Kolesnikova was able to speak with some officials passing through the prison and ask them to inform her father and her lawyer that she had been arrested. After the activist refused to leave the country, they would put a sack over her head, load her into a minivan and take her to the Belarus-Ukraine border, where agents tried to force her out of Belarus. Kolesnikova, however, to avoid being an expat, allegedly tore up her passport.
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Following this umpteenth refusal to leave Belarus, Kolesnikova says she was transferred to the Mozyr Border Military Detachment, where she would remain until the night of 8 September. Then they would take her to Minsk prison. On the same night of September 8, Anton Rodnenkov and Ivan Kravtsov, two other opposition figures who disappeared the morning of the same day, during a press conference from Kiev, Ukraine, reported that they had been put into a minivan that morning and they had been taken to the Ukrainian border at Aleksandrovka. Kravtsov said he had been offered to take Maria Kolesnikova to Ukraine to “ease” the situation in Belarus.
Rodnenkov and Kravtsov later said they found Kolesnikova in a neutral zone between the Belarusian and Ukrainian borders, who had been forced to get into a car with her and cross the border. But at the time of customs control, Kolesnikova tore her passport, got out of the car and returned to the Belarusian border. Then, uniformed Belarusian officers would again force her into a minivan. The two activists also said that in the car that had brought them to Ukraine they had seen plane tickets from Kiev to Vienna and from Vienna to Munich that they thought might be destined for Kolesnikova.
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On the morning of 9 September, the Belarusian authorities raided Kolesnikova’s home in Mnisk and on the same day Kolesnikova’s father said that he had been contacted unofficially by an official who confirmed that his daughter was in detention. On the same day, Maxim Znak and Antonina Konovalova, two other members of the Belarusian opposition, were arrested. According to the agency Interfax Znak would have been arrested in a manner similar to Maria Kolesnikova.
Also on Wednesday Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the main opposition candidate in the presidential elections on August 9, who is in Lithuania, wrote on her Telegram channel that Antonina Konovalova had disappeared and it was not known where she was. Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, said hooded men tried to enter her home. Alexievich is the only prominent opposition figure to be found in Belarus and has not yet been arrested.
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