The pandemic and political crisis has added new dimensions to the health care profession in Belarus.

The recent emboldened moves made by Lukashenka seem to be pushing Belarus even closer into Russia's embrace. Faced with behaviours difficult to explain one must ask - who gains?

This interview was conducted as part of the #PrisonersVoice project of Internews Ukraine. The project aims at drawing global attention to Ukrainian political prisoners who were or are still being kept in Russian prisons. Download the free #PrisonersVoice application for your mobile or tablet on AppStore or GooglePlay to learn more.

This interview was conducted as part of the #PrisonersVoice project of Internews Ukraine. The project aims at drawing global attention to Ukrainian political prisoners who were or are still being kept in Russian prisons. Download the free #PrisonersVoice application for your mobile or tablet on AppStore or GooglePlay to learn more.

Tofiq Yaqublu, the Azerbaijani opposition leader and prisoner of conscience, started a hunger strike demanding the reversal of his recent prison sentence. This is a desperate cry for justice in a country where everything depends on the whim of the president.

Review of Numbers. A film by Oleg Sentsov and Akhtem Seitablayev, Ukraine-Poland-Czech Republic-France, 2020.

A court in Baku recently sentenced a 22-year-old activist to ten years in jail after he spray-painted “No to Dictatorship” and “Happy Slave Day” on a statue of Heydar Aliyev, the former president.

33-year old Ildar Dadin is a former security guard who got married in a Moscow detention centre last February. Cameras were not allowed for the short ceremony but journalist Anastasiya Zotova, now his wife, came out smiling to the well-wishers and reporters waiting in the snow. At that point, Dadin had been under house arrest or behind bars for a year, having neither had any previous convictions nor a particularly high pubic profile. The judge at Moscow’s Basmanny Court had sentenced Dadin to a total of three years of prison.

This piece originally appeared in the current issue of New Eastern Europe. Subscribe now.

On December 8th 1986 at 23:50, in the hospital of a watch factory in the town of Chistopol, Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Anatoly Marchenko, a Soviet prisoner of conscience, died at the age of 48. He was transferred to this hospital from prison after his health deteriorated dramatically as a result of a hunger strike that he declared in August of the same year and continued for several months. He wrote in his letter, which was published 12 years after his death: “Since August 4th I have been on a hunger strike, demanding a stop to the torture of political prisoners in the Soviet Union and their release.” He was buried unnamed under number 646.