Belarus-sia, my pain 

Well, everything seems to have been clear with Russians for a long time - imperial syndrome and so on, the legacy of the Golden Horde, plus slave psychology domestically and aggression externally - but what is wrong with Belarusians? Didn’t we consider them syabrs, which means friends and acquaintances in Belarusian? Or are there no longer any such syabrs of Ukraine left in Belarus, only russified minds with the USSR mentality? Or, maybe, they were never our friends in the first place, and we were just making wishful thinking? After February 24, when Russian troops invaded us coming from Belarus, these questions became even more numerous and painful.  "Why are they like this?" is probably gnawing at many, not just me, now.

“Are there no longer any such syabrs of Ukraine left in Belarus, only russified minds with the USSR mentality? Or, maybe, they were never our friends in the first place, and we were just making wishful thinking? After February 24, when Russian troops invaded us using Belarus, these questions became even more numerous and painful.  "Why are they like this?" is probably gnawing at many, not just me, now”

What do we even know, what do I know about this country and these people? If we start from the very beginning, I remember that we had a large photo album from the Bialowieza Forest, which my mother, a teacher of chemistry and biology, brought back from a trip to that forest. I could barely read at the time, but I was fascinated by the captions in Belarusian under the photos of beautiful forest landscapes, bison and deer, and, strangely enough, I understood almost everything, despite not speaking Belarusian. It was around then that I first learned that there were Belarusians and Belarus, or, as they would call it at the time, Belarussia. But when I first and last visited the Brest region as a student, not far from that forest, I never heard Belarusian language there. My student friend Volodya Tur suggested that I go with him to his cousin's wedding, and it didn't take long to persuade me. Well, the villagers there spoke Ukrainian, and the city people spoke Russian. And we also got a beating from the local guys, because it turned out that they had a custom of giving everyone who wasn't from there a hard time. 

Paradoxically, I first heard Belarusian in Moscow in the spring of 1989 at the last congress of “USSR’s young writers”, when a young Belarusian poet Anatol Sys read an essay, and that was when we met. Not long before that, he had founded the Tuteishi Society of Young Writers in Minsk. I also remember wandering around Moscow's Gorky Park in the company of several other young Ukrainian poets at the time: two of my friends from the Bu-Ba-Bu (Burlesque-Balagan-Buffonade) literary group and the future president of the New Literature Association, looking for a place to drink a bottle of cognac. We never found a place, the park was teeming with cops, and it was the Gorbachev-anti-alcohol era, but we somehow managed to drink that cognac…

In the late nineties, I met Belarusians in Warsaw on scholarship programs. At that time, the Poles generously offered those scholarships to establish independent journalism in the “post-Soviet” countries, and Belarusians were second in number to get on those proposals, of course, after Ukrainians, which is not surprising. They also spoke Belarusian, perhaps not as often as we would have liked, but still... The only problem was that those Belarusians, as a rule, did not want to go back to their country, but were looking for ways to stay in Poland after the program ended, and many of them succeeded.

“There are a lot of Belarusians fighting on the side of Ukraine, for instance the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Regiment. And yet the question remains: why, for example, do they become heroes in our country, while at home their toothless protests in the summer of 2020 against fraudulent elections ended in complete defeat?”

I met completely different Belarusians in the winter of 2016-2017 near Avdiivka among the fighters of our volunteer unit, including Hans's friend Dzmitry Rubashevski. To some extent, he became the prototype of the character named Brest in the novel In the Steppe Near Avdiivka, which I wrote based on my war experiences. My Brest was killed, but I never imagined when I was writing the story that Dzmitry would suffer the same fate... In April 2022, he sacrificed his life for our freedom in the battle against the Russian invaders. It is extremely sad... In fact, as you may know, there are a lot of Belarusians fighting on the side of Ukraine, for instance the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Regiment. And yet the question remains: why, for example, do they become heroes in our country, while at home their toothless protests in the summer of 2020 against fraudulent elections ended in complete defeat? Is it because they don't have their own Western Ukraine, and their russified cities lack patriotic youth and a modern elite? Has Lukashenko trampled the political field to his heart's content in his nearly thirty years in power?

Exclusively for Espreso TV.

About the author: Oleksandr Vilchynskyi is a writer and journalist. In 2016 to 2017 he was a volunteer and fought as a private soldier in the 1st separate assault company of the Ukrainian Air Force.

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