Belarusian authorities detained 52 employees at the Minsk offices of ZROBIM Architects in what human rights activists described as the country’s biggest single raid this year, the Viasna human rights center said. The Associated Press reported that security forces searched the firm on Thursday and held the people on suspicion of disloyalty, including the studio’s founder, Andrei Makouski.
Viasna said the arrests followed a demand that ZROBIM hire a full-time “ideologist” to monitor its staff. On the eve of his detention, Makouski posted on social media that the studio had received a letter from authorities making the demand, according to the AP report.
Pavel Sapelka, a lawyer with Viasna, said in comments to AP that the situation in Belarus is worsening and that even suspicions of disloyalty are enough to trigger the “largest single roundup of creative people this year.” He also said the authorities are using a sequence that starts with arrests, then hacking phones and computers, and only afterward moving to charges.
The AP report also described how Belarusian authorities increasingly use “extremism” designations to criminalize dissent, with penalties of up to 10 years for associating with groups or individuals labeled extremist. Sapelka told AP that authorities recently designated 22 online chat groups used by prisoners’ relatives as extremist, a move he called “a blow to solidarity within the country” that could expose thousands of families to prosecution.
Belarus is a close ally of Russia, and the AP said Minsk has faced isolation for years, including sanctions by Western countries tied to Belarus’s rights crackdown and its role in allowing Moscow to use its territory in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began in 2022. The country, with a population of about 9.5 million, is led by Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled for more than three decades, according to AP.
The crackdown that followed Belarus’s 2020 presidential election challenge is central context in the AP report: after tens of thousands of people protested what they viewed as a rigged vote, more than 65,000 people were arrested, thousands were beaten, and hundreds of independent media outlets and civil society organizations were shut down. Viasna said prominent opposition figures either fled or were imprisoned, and it reported that 913 political prisoners remain behind bars.
The AP said Lukashenko has recently freed some political prisoners in an effort to improve ties with the West, including the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski and dissidents Siarhei Tsikhanouski, Viktar Babaryka and Maria Kolesnikova. Most recently, AP reported that Lukashenko ordered the release of 250 political prisoners in a deal with Washington that lifted some U.S. sanctions, including sanctions relief affecting the Belarusian potash fertilizer industry and the national airline Belavia.
Rights groups, however, told AP that repression continues even after releases, including through measures they said are aimed at people abroad. Viasna reported that authorities have begun revoking passports of released political prisoners who traveled outside Belarus; Bialiatski said his passport was revoked.
“This is yet another form of transnational repression aimed at complicating the lives of deported political prisoners outside the country,” Bialiatski told AP. “The authorities continue their repression and are trying to ritually sever our ties with Belarus.”