Ruslan Zavadzich, a Belorussian IT engineer, walked into a courthouse in Minsk, waiting for a trial to begin. On his way to there, he is sure to have passed familiar sights. The local public university, from which he earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees and began his career in the IT sector, and the Minsk Planetarium, where he would gather weekly on Saturdays with an amateur astronomers’ club and photograph the night sky.
Zavadzich lists his position as IT Deployment Engineer for Netcracker Technology, a U.S.-headquartered system software company, on his LinkedIn profile, though his presence in court had nothing to do with his profession. The 31-year-old was, in fact, awaiting the start of his own trial.
His alleged crime – “Financing of Extremist Activity” – was opened because authorities said he donated less than $100 to political figures, among them Valery Tsepkalo, who briefly ran against President Alexander Lukashenko in 2020.
Lukashenko’s regime frequently labels its opponents as extremists, as it did when arresting a journalist, Roman Protasevich, hauling him off a Ryanair flight in May 2021. Protasevich sat in prison for two years before receiving a pardon, following by what the BBC described as a “forced confession”.
Zavadzich, Protasevich and Tsepkalo are living examples of Lukashenko’s Belarus brain drain, robbing the country of significant hi-tech capital by chasing away those best suited to bring the Belarusian economy through the information age.
Since the beginning of 2022, Belarus’ IT sector has seen more than 13,300 specialists flee Lukashenko’s support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and continued stranglehold on power, with local media noting two mass waves of IT emigrees from the country. Belarus’s GDP ranks it alongside the likes of Slovakia, Bulgaria and Serbia as an emerging economy, but it runs the risk of quickly falling behind its regional neighbours if the gains made in the tech sector quickly evaporate.
And yet, it seems that is precisely a road that Lukashenko is prepared to go down. While the rest of the world’s developing economies are investing heavily in technology, Lukashenko and his regime are comfortable with criminalising small-dollar donations and policing thought, if not outright political oppression.
The Belarus brain drain is now a new phenomenon, but an unfortunate long-standing reality. For years, Lukashenko has drawn close to figures in the hi-tech sphere, only to chase them away as political
refugees. Such was the case with Tsepkalo, who fled the country in 2020 one month after joining the presidential race against Lukashenko.
Tsepkalo was no run-of-the-mill politician. Once an adviser to Lukashenko, he founded the famed Belarus Hi-Tech Park, the “Belarus Silicon Valley”. Lukashenko has since coopted that development to serve his own purposes with authorities closely monitoring cryptocurrency transactions, and Tsepkalo was sentenced to 17 years of prison in-absentia, having fled the country as a political exile.
But the trend goes further back – and includes businessman Viktor Prokopenya, who was chased out of the country for opposing Lukashenko’s dictatorship. Instead of recognising Prokopenya as a model for Belarus’ hi-tech future, Lukashenko drew closer to Russia, rejecting attempts to modernise Belarus’ education programmes. When Prokopenya condemned the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine and stopped business with clients in Russia, he immediately became the victim of a serious DDoS cyber attack. Prokopenya was long an opponent of Lukashenko, even before the invasion, having been detained as far back as 2015 for opposing the regime. Then in 2020, Prokopenya objected to Lukashenko’s dictatorship as part of some 300 CEOs of IT companies, who threatened to move their businesses out of Belarus in protest of the dictatorship’s oppression of protesters.
The evidence points to a long-standing trend and one that is only growing in momentum. On his LinkedIn, Zavadzich’s last accessible post showed him liking Netcracker Technology’s condemnation of the Ukraine invasion. He now sits in jail, with the night sky – once the canvas for his photography – his likely only regular connection to the outside world.
The Belarusian economy will continue to pay the price of Lukashenko’s bloody-mindedness as he continues to cling to power. But its citizens will also count the human cost, the rising stars among them extinguished for daring to question a despotic regime.
Source: otsnews
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