On Wednesday, September 21, former Belarusian presidential candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya spoke about her efforts to advocate for fair elections in Belarus and promote democracy in Ukraine.

The crisis in Ukraine has highlighted political corruption in countries across Europe, mobilizing activists like Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya to organize support for Ukraine while fighting for democracy in Belarus.

In August 2020, Tsikhanouskaya ran in the Belarusian presidential election against current President Alexander Lukashenko, who dismissed her as a non-threat. Tsikhanouskaya ran in the place of her husband, YouTuber and pro-democracy activist Sergei Tikhanovsky, who was planning to run for president before being arrested in May 2020. He remains a political prisoner in Belarus.

The 2020 Belarusian election was widely considered to be fraudulent, with the European Union issuing a statement declaring that it did not stand by the results and Lukashenko’s reelection. After the election, Tsikhanouskaya was forced to flee the country, evoking hundreds of protests across Belarus lasting for four months after her exile.

During Wednesday’s conversation, Tsikhanouskaya referred many times to her “accidental” political career, which began in response to dire need but never something she had planned on. She was born in a granite mining town in South Belarus in 1982, three years before Chernobyl. Before entering politics, she worked as an educator, taking care of her hearing-impaired son and teaching other children affected by the disaster. However, with her husband’s sudden arrest, she decided to take the political situation in Belarus into her own hands.

Tsikhanouskaya—who received a standing before her speech to a packed room—was joined in conversation by Alexander Cooley, Professor of Political Science at Barnard College. At the start of the talk, Tsikhanouskaya spoke lovingly about her husband, currently sentenced to eighteen years in prison in Belarus without access to a lawyer or basic human necessities. Since fleeing Belarus in 2020, Tsikhanouskaya has lived in Lithuania, Poland, and the United States, meeting President Biden and other world leaders. She has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her non-violent challenges to Lukashenko and advocacy for a free Belarus; however, she said in Wednesday’s discussion that “support is not enough; we need action.”

Ukraine was a major focus in the discussion of her hopes for a free Europe, with Tsikhanouskaya comparing the situation there to that of Belarus. Ukraine, she said, represents “thousands more victims of tyranny.” Despite the challenges facing her own country, she believes that “we must stay united to protect Ukraine,” and that “the fate of Belarus is decided in the fate of Ukraine.”

Cooley and Tsikhanouskaya discussed Lukashenko’s leadership in supporting the invasion of Ukraine, including amending Belarus’s constitution to change their neutral status in the conflict in order to support Russian forces. According to Tsikhanousaya, “[Lukashenko] gave our land as a launching pad for Russian troops to invade Ukraine,” despite Belarusians taking to the streets in order to protest the war. During the spring and summer, Belarusian citizens took pictures of Russian troops and sent the information to Ukraine, and military volunteers joined the Ukrainian army.

Tsikhanouskaya believes that by staying united, citizens in Ukraine and in Belarus will prevail against the struggles they are facing. “Dictatorships seem to be stable until they are not,” she said. And “when things happen, they happen fast.”

Tsikhanouskaya is currently a leader in exile, living outside her native country. In response to Cooley’s question about maintaining contact with the citizens still in Belarus, she referred to the role of the media in keeping people connected. Many pro-democracy media sources have had to flee Belarus, but have managed to continue their activity in exile. Tsikhanouskaya remains in constant contact with Belarus by speaking to people on the phone, and people in Belarus still have access to alternative media, despite the government’s efforts to restrict its influence (including the forced landing of a flight on May 23 so that Belarusian officials could arrest a journalist). Even so, Tsikhanouskaya said that people who have fled Belarus “still feel that they are in danger all the time” as they work to help those still within the country.

In response to a question about her most pressing priorities right now, Tsikhanouskaya referred to her work as the leader of the Belarusian democratic movement and a symbol of a peaceful challenge to Lukashenko’s regime. She corrected Cooley’s reference to her work as a leader of the “opposition,” stating that she isn’t opposing the will of the people since “the majority of persons [in Belarus] are against the regime.” Right now, she is focusing her efforts on showing support for Ukraine, since “the fate of democracy is being decided for all countries” with Ukraine’s plight. Putin, she said, doesn’t consider Ukraine and Belarus as separate countries, just part of the Soviet empire.

During Tsikhanouskaya’s 2020 presidential run, Lukashenko made a point of saying that Belarus was not ready for a woman president. Tsikhanouskaya acknowledged that she hadn’t originally planned on a career in politics, but her commitment to independence in Belarus and freedom for political prisoners like her husband made her choice to run for president easy, since she knew it was “the right path.”

“Every day I feel pain for the prisoners, for my husband. Thousands of families have people in jail,” she said. But she took it upon herself to “be the voice” of people suffering in Belarus, and gaining the support of other people continues to encourage her to “go on this difficult path.”

Responding to an audience member’s question, Tsikhanouskaya brought up the folk-tale of the Emperor’s new clothes with regard to the political corruption in Belarus and other European countries; “this war in Ukraine has shown that the king is naked.” However, she believes that “it is absolutely possible to gain independence and gain peace in the country” with the support of activists who believe in “the same values as Democratic countries.”

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya at Columbia’s World Leaders Forum via Bwog Staff