The socio-political conflict in Belarus has the potential to grow even more acute, even though street rallies have all but disappeared and the authorities have, for several months now, pursued a hard counter-offensive. Those arrests and firings continue. Thus, in Grodno, Andrzej Pisalnik, the secretary of the unrecognized Union of Poles, was arrested together with his wife—in addition to earlier apprehensions of this entity’s activists (see EDM, April 7). In Minsk, Yelena Baranova, a pediatric cardiologist with 25 years of experience, was fired from both a state-run healthcare center and a private clinic for her Facebook posts, in which she expressed her loathing of riot police who mistreated her son (Euroradio, April 14).
Protests in Belarus
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Law enforcement officers patrol the street in Minsk, on March 25, 2021.
