Alexander Lukashenko, the former Soviet state farm director turned Belarus strongman, once said that a woman could never run his country. Then three of them challenged him.
Five years on from the biggest protests in Belarusian history, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and Veronika Tsepkalo, both now in exile, have been speaking to the BBC about the price they paid for inspiring hundreds of thousands of Belarusians to take to the streets to call for change.
Their former teammate, Maria Kolesnikova, is now in a Belarusian prison, sentenced in 2021 to 11 years for extremism and plotting to overthrow the government.
Her sister Tatsiana Khomich tells the BBC the family haven’t heard from her since last year.
The three women joined forces in August 2020, when the opposition candidates they were supporting were all forced to end their presidential bids.
Their short-lived alliance made global headlines with pictures of them showing a heart, a fist, and a victory sign with their hands.
They claimed it took them 15 minutes to agree to join forces against Lukashenko, who has been in charge of Belarus since 1994.
“Far quicker than it would take men to do it,” said Veronika Tsepkalo, at the time.
She was left in charge of her husband Valery Tsepkalo’s campaign after the former Belarusian ambassador to the US was barred from registering as a candidate and fled the country fearing arrest.
Maria Kolesnikova campaigned for banker Viktor Babaryko, who was also prevented from standing and arrested ahead of the election.
But it was Svetlana Tikhanovskaya who ended up on the ballot, stepping in for her husband, the activist and popular video blogger Sergei Tikhanovsky, after he too was thrown in jail.
Together the three women travelled around the country, drawing big crowds of supporters eager for change. Their promise was simple: release all political prisoners, then hold a free and fair election.
In 2025, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya speaks about the “emotional uplift” all of them felt during those days.
“We managed to unite Belarusians”, she tells the BBC.
When election day came on 9 August, people flocked to the polls. Svetlana’s supporters were convinced she had won the vote, but Alexander Lukashenko claimed a landslide victory.
This sparked unprecedented mass demonstrations across the country, which lasted for several months. The authorities responded with a brutal crackdown. At least four people were killed – their deaths blamed on the security forces.
But none of the three women who had electrified the campaign, were there to lead the protestors.
Tsepkalo left Belarus just before the election. Tikhanovskaya was detained by the KGB a day after the vote and forced out of the country under threat of being jailed and losing her children to state care.
Maria Kolesnikova stayed behind. She was arrested in September, after tearing up her passport at the border with Ukraine to prevent a forceful expulsion.
Along with her former boss Viktor Babaryko, she is one of more than a thousand political prisoners still held in Belarus, according to a human rights group Viasna.
Since 2020 tens of thousands of people have been arrested for opposing the regime, many say they have suffered torture and mistreatment while in detention.
Today, any public dissent in Belarus is crushed.
“I sincerely believed that Lukashenko’s regime would fall”, Veronika Tsepkalo tells the BBC.
Like hundreds of thousands of Belarusians who are estimated to have left the county after 2020, she now lives abroad with her family, working at a big tech company in the UK.
So what went wrong with the protest movement?
“It was this all-or-nothing approach”, says Tatsiana Khomich, Kolesnikova’s sister who is now campaigning for release of Belarusian political prisoners. “We overestimated ourselves and underestimated what the authorities are capable of.”
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya says she now understands they had no plan and “weren’t ready for any radical change”.
Once a stay-at-home mum who admitted to being shy and lacking her husband’s charisma, she is now recognised as leader of the democratic opposition in exile, and regularly meets heads of state and lobbies for sanctions against Lukashenko’s government.
“If I could transfer my present knowledge, my experience to myself five years ago, I would definitely have felt more confident,” Tikhanovskaya says. “I’ve learned a bit of diplomacy, how to talk to politicians, how to be comfortable around powerful people”.
Less than two months ago Svetlana unexpectedly got her husband back: Sergei Tikhanovsky was released along with 13 other political prisoners and sent to Lithuania to his family.
It is thought that Donald Trump’s administration was key in securing their release.
Having said in the past that she went into politics “out of love” for her husband, Tikhanovskaya now admits she’s since also fallen in love with Belarus and the vision for her country.
“We’re not going to compete with Sergei about who’s more important, who has more followers et cetera. Sergei will be a natural fit for our movement,” she says.
Tikhanovskaya rarely speaks to Veronika Tsepkalo and in the interview with the BBC doesn’t want to go into details of what happened to their relationship.
Tsepkalo is more candid: she accuses her former “sister-in-arms” of hijacking their movement and pushing her out.
“The trio has broken up”, states Tatsiana Khomich.
Khomich, who is still part of her sister’s team, says all of them now have their own projects.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya says her priority is working towards the release of political prisoners and lists helping Belarusians abroad and keeping Belarus on the international agenda as her achievements.
Veronika Tsepkalo is sceptical of these successes, calling them “action for action’s sake”.
Back in her husband’s team, she has been campaigning to bring Alexander Lukashenko to international justice.
Tatsiana Khomich thinks that trying to force regime change from abroad is “meaningless”.
“In reality, we’re now much further away from it than we were five years ago”, she says.
Both Tikhanovskaya and Tsepkalo believe at some point in the future there will be a free and democratic Belarus.
When asked to respond to criticism that she had put her own ambitions before her team, Tikhanovskaya says:
“Maybe that’s the kind of thing people who don’t really know me would say. I’d like us to finally hold new and fair elections but I certainly won’t be taking part in them.”
Kapela (ensemble) Rej is a group performing traditional Belarusian music. Their main instruments are the duda (Belarusian bagpipe) and the violin.
The ensemble on the recording:
Vital Voranaŭ: duda
Ursula Oleksiak: violin, vocals
featuring Sergi Llena (Spain): frame drum, gaita de boto
The recordings were made in Serbia during the Rog Banata festival in the towns of Zrenjanin (2024, tracks 1-9) and Bečej (2023, tracks 10-13). The album cover photo was taken at the performance in Belgrade in 2024 by Sandra Crepulja.
Released August 27, 2025
Source: Antonovka Records (Bandcamp)
Maria Kalesnikava, musician, activist, and political prisoner, was detained on this day in 2020. She was kidnapped on the Minsk street by the Belarusian authorities and the next day taken to the Belarusian-Ukrainian border to be thrown out of the country. But she tore up her passport and thus could not cross the border. In 2021, together with Maksim Znak, she was sentenced to 11 years of imprisonment (Maksim got 10 years). Now she is kept in Homiel women’s colony.
Kalesnikava is of my age, and five years of her life she has already spent in jail. Since February 2025, Maria and her family have exchanged no letters or calls… At least, she is not in solitary confinement but kept together with other female prisoners.
I’ve not been writing about the political situation in Belarus for a while, but that is not because there is some improvement. No, every day we read about new detentions. This week human rights defenders have recognized 14 new political prisoners, and the authorities have added 68 names to the so-called “extremist list”. All in all, we now know about 1197 political prisoners, 32 foreign citizens among them. A recent case: a 52-year old British citizen (she also has the Belarusian citizenship) was arrested while crossing the Belarusian border and sentenced to 7 years of prison (https://spring96.org/en/news/118604).
But still hundreds stay unrecognized because of different reasons. Without free Belarus, you won’t have peace in Europe.
Source: Julia Cimafiejeva (Facebook), 7 September 2025
Yesterday, I wrote about the five years Maria Kalesnikava had already spent in jail and about 1197 political prisoners in Belarus. And today, we’ve learned about another death.
Political prisoner Andrei Padniabenny, a 36-year-old Russian citizen, has died in Mahiloŭ penal colony No. 15. He was tried twice on criminal charges and sentenced to 16 years and eight months in a medium-security penal colony. He had been behind bars for nearly four years. The exact cause of his death is unknown.
His mother Valiantsina, reported on Facebook:
“My precious grandchildren are left without a father… The only consolation is that no one will be able to torture my son anymore, either physically or psychologically… I believe that God’s justice will reach the guilty, and no crime will go unpunished….”
According to the publication, Andrei died on September 3. This is the ninth death of a political prisoner in Belarus and the second death of a Russian citizen behind bars.
Other political prisoners who died in captivity:
Vitold Ašurak
Aleś Puškin
Mikałaj Klimovič
Vadzim Kraśko
Ihar Lednik
Dźmitry Šlethaŭer
Valancin Štermier
Alaksandr Kulinič
Mikola Dziadok in happier times. Courtesy of his 
