Last opposition leader in Belarus ‘abducted by masked men’ as Lukashenko prepares for Moscow talks

The last female Belarusian opposition leader left in the country has reportedly been abducted by masked men in Minsk as emboldened authoritarian Alexander Lukashenko looks to crush opposition to his presidency.

Maria Kolesnikova was snatched from the street and bundled into a minibus in the centre of the capital on Monday, a witness told local media.  

Her apparent kidnapping came after police arrested hundreds of protesters across the country on Sunday as part of crackdown on opposition to Mr Lukashenko, whose hand has apparently been strengthened by increasingly vocal support from Russia in the face of growing international condemnation and looming sanctions.

The president, widely believed to have rigged the country’s election last month, is to travel to Moscow for talks “in the coming days”, the Kremlin said on Monday after Russian prime minister Mikhail Mishustin’s visit to Minsk last week.

Ms Kolesnikova was one of three women leading the protest movement alongside allies Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and Veronika Tsepkalo, who have both fled Belarus amid a sweeping crackdown on demonstrations.  

Ms Kolesnikova had announced on 31 August that she was forming a new political party, Together, with the team of jailed opposition figure Viktor Babariko.

She was reportedly snatched from a street near Minsk’s Independence Avenue, the scene of repeated demonstrations against Mr Lukashenko over the past month, and bundled into a minibus marked with the word “Communication”.

“I walked forward and heard the sound of a phone falling on the asphalt, some kind of stamping, turned around and saw that people in civilian clothes and in masks were pushing Maria into this minibus,” Belarusian news website Tut.by quoted the witness as saying.

The Coordination Council, the organisation formed by opposition politicians to steer efforts to unseat the president, said it had been unable to contact Ms Kolesnikova or her colleagues Ivan Kravtsov and Anton Rodnenkov.

It accused the Lukashenko regime of using “terror” instead of “a dialogue with society”.

“Such methods are unlawful and will only exacerbate the situation in the country, deepen the crisis and fuel more protests,” the council said in a statement.

Belarusian police said it had not detained Ms Kolesnikova and was investigating her disappearance, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported. The interior ministry also denied involvement, but state security services remained silent.

Ms Tsikhanouskaya, who ran for election against Mr Lukashenko after her activist husband Sergei was jailed and blocked from standing himself, condemned Ms Kolesnikova’s apparent abduction as an attempt to derail the opposition council and intimidate its 600 members.  

Ben Challis, policy fellow and Eastern Europe specialist at the European Leadership Network, said the kidnapping suggests Mr Lukashenko feels increasingly confident in his position despite weeks of large-scale protests.

“We’ve seen signs in recent weeks that Russia is perhaps more willing to throw its weight behind Lukashenko than it was at the very early stages,” he told The Independent.  

Support for Mr Lukashenko among the Belarusian elite is also holding firm, while strikes among workers in opposition to the president have faltered, said Mr Challis, who predicted the president would ultimately survive the protests.

“Realistically, if there was ever going to be a serious threat to Lukashenko’s regime it was going to come from [protesters’] ability to orchestrate some kind of split from Lukashenko’s elite base and that doesn’t appear to have transpired,” he added.

After a violent crackdown on demonstrations that stoked international outrage and swelled the ranks of protesters in the first days following the 9 August election, authorities in Belarus appear to have switched to threats and more selective arrests of opposition activists.

An estimated 100,000 protesters demanding the resignation of Mr Lukashenko took part in rallies in Minsk and other cities over the weekend despite warning of reprisals.

The interior ministry said 633 people were arrested on Sunday for taking part in unsanctioned protests. Footage published by local media showed masked men snatching student demonstrators from the street and hauling them away.

The arrests were condemned by the other European governments, amid reports the EU is planning to impose economic sanctions on dozens of senior Belarusian officials including the country’s interior minister by mid-September.

German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said “the only response that Lukashenko and his people seem to have for at the moment is naked violence”.

“We demand the immediate release of all those who were arrested before the elections, on the day of the election and since the election, simply for exerting their democratic, self-evidential rights as citizens,” he added.

Lithuania’s foreign minister Linas Linkevicius compared the abduction of Ms Kolesnikova to a tactic of Stalin-era Soviet secret police.

“Instead of talking to the people of Belarus, the outgoing leadership is trying cynically [to] eliminate one by one,” he wrote on Twitter. “The kidnapping... is a disgrace.”