Belarusian law students enrolled at European Humanities University are filing reports with JURIST on current circumstances in Belarus under the constitutionally-disputed presidency of Alexander Lukashenka. Katsiaryna Vasilionak files this dispatch from Vilnius, Lithuania.  

On the night of July 11, Belarusian political prisoner artist Ales Pushkin died in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Grodno. On the evening of July 13, in the evening, a message appeared about the death of Andrei Makarevich, who was serving his sentence in the notorious Okrestino detention center.

Ales Pushkin

Ales Pushkin was a well–known Belarusian nonconformist painter, theater artist, performer, art curator. He was a rare certified restoration specialist in Belarus.

Pushkin was also known for his performances. In 1999, he brought a cart with manure to the presidential administration offices, on which a poster with the inscription “Alexander Lukashenka with the people” was pinned with a pitchfork.

In 1996, he painted the walls of an Orthodox church in his native village of Bobr and, when painting the fresco “The Last Judgment”, depicted among sinners people similar to Lukashenka and Metropolitan Filaret surrounded by riot police. In 2005, this fragment of the painting was covered up under the supervision of the Minsk church authorities.

In 2020, during the mass protests against Lukashenka, Ales Pushkin stood alone with a white-red-white flag in front of a cordon of security forces.

At the end of March 2022, Pushkin was sentenced to five years in a strict regime colony, having been found guilty of deliberate actions to rehabilitate Nazism committed by a group of individuals and abuse of state symbols. The reason was the portraits painted by the artist of Belarusians who fought against the Soviet Union.

Ales Pushkin had an ulcer. And they didn’t help him in time in prison. Ales Pushkin was taken to the Grodno hospital in an unconscious state. He developed peritonitis, septic condition and multiple organ failure. Simply put, he had a hole in his stomach. There was practically no chance of salvation. In his last letters to his family, he told them that he had lost 22 kilograms in a very short time and had a kidney cold.

Andrey Makarevich

This prisoner died in Okrestino.

He was not recognized as a political prisoner. His former cellmate says that Andrei was convicted of petty theft for about 15 days, but he was sent to a cell with political prisoners because they found some reposts from protest Telegram channels in his phone.

According to the cellmate, the man occasionally asked Akrestin’s medical staff for inhalers, as he was an asthmatic. They were not always issued to him – one of the doctors refused to issue them and Makarevich spent a day without an inhaler.

“It was on Sunday – I woke up, the guys are standing, shouting ‘call the button’.  It turned out that Andrey got up, went to the toilet, went to wash his hands, and fell right next to the sink.

An ambulance was called, it arrived almost immediately, three minutes after the call. But it was not possible to save Andrei.”

Since the beginning of the protests in 2020, the Lukashenka regime has killed at least 24 people.