How war in Ukraine and repression at home steered the diehard football ultras of Belarus towards protest, prison and exile. The regime finally came for Andrei during the morning shift. An officer from the state security service showed up on the factory floor, asking after him. News of the visit travelled up the assembly line, reaching the young man with the buzz-cut who was fitting together drivers’ cabins for the military trucks. He grabbed his phone and frantically began wiping the data. After the endless pitched battles on stadium terraces, the injuries, insults and graffitied walls, it would be a phone call that sealed Andrei’s fate. Factory worker by week and a leader of the Torpedo Minsk ultras by weekend, Andrei had called his best friend the previous night to discuss the anti-government protests sweeping Belarus. Little did he know that the security services were listening in. He was picked up at his workplace the very next day and bundled away to the police headquarters, ahead of a surprise visit to the factory by none other than President Alexander Lukashenko himself – the target of the protestors’ fury. (…) In Belarus, a smaller ultra movement would be inspired by tales of Ukrainian football hooligans making history. Like the Ukrainians, the Belarusian ultras opposed Moscow’s influence over their country, on nationalist grounds. They would look to Ukraine as a model for confronting Russia. Meanwhile, Russia would end up using the client state of Belarus as a launchpad for its ambitions in Ukraine. “The fight for Ukraine is also the fight for Belarus,” said Zmicier Mickiewicz, a supporter of Slavia, a club from the southern city of Mazyr, who now lives in exile in Warsaw. “The West should look at a map. Had Putin been denied free entry into Belarus, Russian troops would not have reached the gates of Kyiv.” Vladimir Putin’s Russia has promoted nationalism at home and abroad as an alternative to liberal democracy. Yet along Russia’s western flank, in countries such as Belarus and Ukraine, nationalism has also galvanised the resistance to Putin. Nationalism is important, Andrei said, when it means “defending your country so that it is independent, and defending your culture so that it remains distinct from Russian.”
via balkan insight: RAGE AGAINST THE REGIME: THE ULTRAS WHO STOOD UP TO LUKASHENKO