Alexander Opeikin led a person of the most thriving handball clubs in ex-Soviet Belarus.
These days, he is a fugitive wished for “harming national security”, living in exile in Ukraine.
In 2012, he founded the Vityaz club in the nation of 9.5 million folks, whose President Alexander Lukashenko champions sports activities as an ideological pillar of his a long time-extended rule.
Due to the fact assuming workplace in 1994, he has handed athletes authorities awards, keys to cars and apartments, and thousands of pounds in money for their victories at international championships and Olympic medals.
“He attempted to make athletes faithful to him and translate this loyalty more to their audience,” Opeikin, 35, advised Al Jazeera.
Lukashenko’s tenure as head of the Belarusian Olympic Committee (NOC) was only marginally shorter than his ongoing presidency – he terminated it very last November just after the Intercontinental Olympic Committee (IOC) barred him from attending the Tokyo Games.
Now, the NOC is headed by Lukashenko’s eldest son, Viktor, who was also banned from attending.
The ban followed Lukashenko’s brutal crackdown on mass anti-govt protests which gripped Belarus following his victory in a disputed August 9, 2020 vote.
The poll handed the 66-yr-previous a sixth presidential time period, but his political opponents and some poll staff claimed that his landslide victory was rigged.
Athletes protest
Opeikin’s handball club stopped schooling in protest and was eradicated from the nationwide championship.
He and its users took section in the the latest rallies and ended up amongst more than 1,000 athletes who signed a petition urging Lukashenko to quit the crackdown.
Lukashenko considered it “treason”.
“He acquired so worried of protesting sportsmen since he understands pretty properly that renowned athletes strongly influence community opinion,” explained Opeikin, who fled to neighbouring Ukraine following becoming charged with “harming the nationwide security” and “disseminating deliberately untrue information” in April.
“Lukashenko considers them all traitors,” he included.
These days, Opeikin heads the Belarusian Athletics Solidarity Fund, a team based mostly in the Ukrainian money, Kyiv, that will help athletes in problems or exile.
At least 95 of people who signed the petition confronted detention immediately after taking part in the protests, seven encounter criminal rates they believe are politically enthusiastic, and an additional 124 endured other forms of abuse, in accordance to the Ukrainian branch of global human rights team Amnesty Intercontinental.
“Belarusian athletes have paid a high price tag for daring to speak out and it’s clear that activity is now a battleground for reprisals in Belarus,” Amnesty’s researcher Heather McGill claimed in a assertion very last week.
No extra video games
But the plight of Belarusian athletes only obtained global notice earlier this month, when Olympic sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya refused her team’s orders to journey residence early from the Tokyo Game titles.
The 24-calendar year-old reported she feared for her safety in Belarus.
Even just after Poland granted her a humanitarian visa, considerations around her stability pressured her to switch planes at the last minute and fly to Warsaw by using Vienna.
These fears have been fuelled by an incident in May well which noticed Lukashenko dispatch a military services jet to drive a Lithuania-sure passenger plane traveling about Belarus to land in Minsk, after which police arrested on-board opposition journalist Roman Protasevich for his alleged involvement in “extremism”.
Protasevich, who faces up to 15 several years in jail if convicted, appeared in a “confession” online video that supporters stated was recorded below duress.
Then an additional Belarusian Olympian decided to defect.
On August 3, decathlete Andreu Krauchanka, who gained a silver medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and holds the Belarusian national history for the function, determined to continue to be in Germany with his spouse, heptathlete Yana Maksimava, she wrote on Instagram.
“One can reduce not only flexibility, but life there,” she wrote less than a photograph of herself and her smaller son.
“It is possible to breathe freely right here and be just one of those who fights for the liberty of their people, relations, and liked kinds we will prevail for certain,” she included.
The few designed their conclusion several hours after 26-yr-old Belarusian opposition figure Critical Shyshou was observed hanged in a park in close proximity to his dwelling in Kyiv.
Ukrainian police said there were being traces of beating on his system, and his friends assert he was assassinated by Belarusian protection agents.
For his part, Lukashenko has denied that Belarus experienced any component in Shyshou’s demise and has said he thinks Tsimanouskaya was “manipulated” into her final decision by “outside forces”.
Rule of regulation ‘meltdown’
Considering that it gained independence in 1991, none of the elections in Belarus has been considered free of charge and reasonable by worldwide observers, and just about every one particular has absent hand in hand with a violent squashing of dissent.
But past year’s rallies – and Lukashenko’s reaction – had been unparalleled in scope.
They drew up to 200,000 persons and lasted for months, paralysing city centres and prompting strikes among workers in point out-run factories, Lukashenko’s main supporters.
Some 30,000 protesters ended up arrested, rights groups reported, and hundreds were allegedly overwhelmed.
Seven persons were shot for the duration of the protests or died shortly immediately after them, in accordance to impartial media studies.
“What we have viewed in the time considering that [the election], is a comprehensive meltdown of the rule of regulation in the region, and the commencing of the finish for the Lukashenko regime,” Ivar Dale, a senior plan adviser with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a legal rights watchdog, informed Al Jazeera.
But the protesters did not have a charismatic and determined chief.
Presidential hopeful and political to start with-timer Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who came second in very last year’s poll with 10 % of the vote, fled to neighbouring Lithuania, and more mature, extra seasoned opposition figures did not dare to return to Belarus from exile.
Economic turbulence
In spite of remaining sanctioned by the West over its reaction to very last year’s protests and cornered politically, Lukashenko’s Belarus however retains its head over drinking water economically.
Last year, many gurus predicted an economic crisis, but the put up-pandemic economic boom saw charges for Belarus’s major exports – potassium fertiliser, petrol and foodstuffs – skyrocket.
Belarus has Soviet-period chemical crops and two giant oil processing crops that work on discounted Russian crude.
Its booming IT sector, which has savored tax breaks and other benefits, also thrives even although many businesses and programmers fled the state amid the crackdown.
Nonetheless, 2022 may perhaps be significantly a lot more detrimental, gurus warn.
“Next 12 months, a extended recession in the Belarusian economic climate might start out, [coupled with] a stagflation if the inflation aspect is additional,” Kyiv-dependent analyst Aleksey Kushch informed Al Jazeera.
He also explained Russia has decreased its subsidies to Minsk from 5 % of the Belarusian gross domestic item (GDP) to about 2 per cent.
For decades, Belarus has been dependent on Russia’s multibillion- loans and despatched most of its exports to its giant jap neighbour, in which hundreds of hundreds of Belarusians do the job in the development and agriculture sectors.