BIALYSTOK
Having missed almost four years of her son’s life while incarcerated in a Belarusian prison, Irina Schastnaya still wants to zip up the 14-year-old’s coat, struggling to digest how tall he grew in her absence.
German was 10 when security services broke into their home in Minsk, raiding the flat and arresting his mother in front of him for challenging authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko’s rule. “I managed to say to him: ‘German don’t worry, everything will be fine,” she told media, recalling the November 2020 morning that “changed our lives forever.”
Her arrest was just one of a huge crackdown on dissent orchestrated by Lukashenko after tens of thousands protested his 2020 election victory, claiming widespread fraud. In power since 1994, the Moscow ally is set to secure another term in power this weekend in an election with no real competition. The Viasna rights group says Belarus currently has 1,256 political prisoners, and all opposition leaders are either in jail or in exile.
Within days of Schastnaya’s 2020 arrest, German’s father fled the country with the boy — settling in Kyiv, before leaving for Poland when it became clear Russia may invade Ukraine. Schastnaya was sentenced to four years for editing a Telegram channel critical of the government. Sent to Penal Colony Number Four in the city of Gomel, she was made to sew military and construction uniforms at the prison factory.
But she spent most of the time “thinking of German.” They were allowed one video call a month — under the close watch of a prison officer. “He did not like those calls,” she said. “He could literally see the person listening in the frame.” They were reunited in September 2024, when Schastnaya was released and fled Belarus to join her family in Poland’s Bialystok — close to Belarus and long a hub for exiles.
“When I opened the door, I saw this tall guy,” she told media, still visibly shaken.”It’s like heaven and earth. It’s not the same mothering… He was 10 when I was arrested, he still held my hand when we walked in the street.” Like other ex-prisoners media spoke to, Schastnaya now has one wish: to get those who remain behind bars out — by all “possible and impossible” means.
