Transnational Repression Against Belarusians — An Article in Ställ om! Magazine
Ställ om!, a Swedish digital magazine focused on peace and climate justice, published an article about transnational repression against Belarusians. Anatolij Kotov’s disappearance highlights the escalating danger faced by Belarusian political exiles and human rights defenders targeted by Lukashenko’s regime. The public threats and so-called “execution lists” show that transnational repression is becoming a direct physical threat to Olga Karach, Veronika Tsepkalo, Yevgeny Vilsky, and others.
The Belarusian exile organization Our House reports on Anatolij Kotov — a political activist, human rights defender, and former high-ranking official within Aleksandr Lukashenko’s system, who after 2020 openly took a stand against violence and repression and lived in political exile. He has been missing since August 2025, and his whereabouts remain unknown.
Anatolij Kotov is one of five people whom the Belarusian regime has publicly declared to be “participants in a conspiracy” against Lukashenko. All of them were sentenced in absentia in Belarus to 12 years in prison, accused of “extremism” and “conspiracy to seize power.”
The others in this group are: Olga Karach — human rights defender and head of the organization Our House; Veronika Tsepkalo — one of the three central figures of the Belarusian opposition in 2020; and Yevgeny Vilsky — from the Social Democratic Party Narodnaya Hramada.
Of particular concern is the fact that the state newspaper Belarus Segodnya devoted a separate publication to these people, in which they were effectively declared to be included on the regime’s so-called “execution lists.” The article explicitly claimed that these people should be destroyed without trial or investigation, “on the spot,” without warning.
Against the background of these threats of public extrajudicial executions, Anatolij Kotov’s disappearance takes on an especially dangerous character and shows that Olga Karach, Veronika Tsepkalo, and Yevgeny Vilsky are also in immediate and very serious physical danger.
The issue of the magazine, dated March 8, 2026, which includes this letter
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