Protest movement in Belarus: the grandmother who opposes Lukashenko’s police officers



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Nina Baginskaja is 73 years old and confronts masked men on the streets of Minsk who are armed with batons.

He has been fighting for a long time against the Lukashenko regime: Nina Baginskaja.

He has long been fighting against the Lukashenko regime: Nina Baginskaja.

Photo: Dmitri Lovetsky (Keystone)

She is not afraid, she has never been afraid. Nina Baginskaja is 73 years old and faces masked men who are armed with batons and wear heavy boots. Over the weekend, during mass protests in Belarus, she ripped the mask off one of the martial-looking policemen from Omon’s special unit. She wants to see who is hiding behind this masquerade, who is involved in the state’s repression against the population. “Nina, Nina,” the protesters around her were shouting. Baginskaya has a huge following these days, she has courage.

Her cult status had already increased two weeks ago when the retiree and the multiple short-haired white-haired grandmother fought off the special police. Dozens of men were in formation when one of them seized the Baginskaya opposition red and white flag. He clung to the flagpole and shouted, “Give me my flag, give me my flag.” An uneven duel. Then he kicked the man in the shin. He later told the BBC that it was not good behavior, “but if something is stolen, you can be bad Thank you very much say””

With flags, posters, determination and dignity

With flags, posters, determination and dignity, Nina Baginskaja has been fighting against the regime of head of state Alexander Lukashenko, of whom she is “paranoid”, every day since the weeks of protest began.» calls that will not go alone.

What she wants? That the Belarusian people are free. Baginskaja has wanted this for a long, long time. They rebelled against the Belarusian leadership when Lukashenko was still the head of a sovkhoz in Soviet times. Maybe that’s why Baginskaya doesn’t want to be called a hero these days. She had fought so many fights against the authorities when she was practically alone. For her personally, not much will change, except that tens of thousands are now doing the same, young women are taking selfies with her and Baginskaja hopes that all this has something to do with it.

The authorities have confiscated part of his pension

The Minsk woman has been arrested and fined so frequently in recent years that the authorities have confiscated part of her pension. Since 2016, it has initially been 20 percent and has been half for three years. Baginskaya recently told the Belarusian edition of the newspaper that she must be at least 120 years old to pay all her fines. Komsomolskaya Pravda. It should have been a total of about 15,000 euros when he stopped counting.

Nina Baginskaja was born shortly after the end of World War II. Her parents experienced the terror of the German occupation and talked about it as a family. As a child she was fascinated by cycling, she dreamed of a sports career, but a serious accident forced her to make new plans. Baginskaja became a geologist and joined the Belarusian Popular Front. The party was founded in 1988 during the time of Gorbachev’s perestroika and at that time campaigned for the prosecution of Stalin’s crimes. That same year, Nina Baginskaya went to a protest rally for the first time.

The commemorative campaign was dissolved and the Minsk woman began a life as an activist. In 1994, after Lukashenko took office, she was fired after writing a report in Belarusian instead of the official Russian language, a sign of resistance at the time.

A photo that photographer Yevgeny Otzezkij took of her in 2006 in front of the white Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Minsk became almost iconographic: a chain of policemen on the stairs, Baginskaya alone with the historic white-red-white protest flag in front of them . And even then, she did not release the flag from her hand.

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