After his release from prison, Alexei faced a new challenge: he has been unable to find work, while at home his mother is battling advanced cancer and requires constant care.
Private fundraising
For displaying two flags in 2022 — the white-red-white flag and the Ukrainian flag — Kateryna Zaretskaya was sentenced to 5 years in a correctional facility. After being deported first to Ukraine and then to Poland, Katya faced the consequences of the hard labour she endured in the correctional facility — hernias and a spinal disc protrusion. She needs help paying for a rehabilitation course to preserve her health and ability to work.
After taking part in the 2020 protests, Alexander was sentenced to three years of confinement in an open correctional facility. He appealed the sentence and, while waiting for the appeal to be heard, left for Georgia to avoid imprisonment. He lived and worked there for five years until problems with his documents led to his deportation. Now he urgently needs support.
Anna is 50 years old. She was an associate professor, headed a university department, and worked on projects aimed at making Belarusian cities better. But in 2023, she was arrested when she returned home to visit her mother.
Larisa, a former correspondent for Belsat, is now a former political prisoner and an ethnographic photographer. In 2025, she was deported from Belarus to Lithuania three months before her release. She is waiting for international protection in Poland; due to the Dublin procedure, her case has been delayed, and she needs support during this period.
A former political prisoner who was forcibly taken out of Belarus needs help with vital dental prosthetics so that she can eat.
Nikita Zolotarev was arrested at the age of 16, after which he ended up in intensive care and then in a remand centre. He spent almost six years behind bars in a juvenile correctional facility and prison, where he was beaten, tortured, and denied the necessary medication for epilepsy. In March 2026, Nikita was forcibly deported from the country to Lithuania.
Tatiana is 54 years old. Before her arrest, she had a stable life: she worked as a chief accountant, owned her own apartment, and had just finished paying off her mortgage. But in March 2023, she was sentenced to four and a half years in a penal colony under nine politically motivated criminal charges.
Katya Bartko applied for asylum in the United States because of political persecution in Belarus. As a result of a wrongful arrest, she ended up in an immigration detention centre, without the life-saving medication she needs, and came within a hair's breadth of death. Her partner Dmitry is asking for help to free her from detention with the assistance of lawyers and prevent her deportation to Belarus.