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Бросившие вызов Лукашенко

What happened to the Belarusian women who stood up to Lukashenko?

This year marked the five years since the anti-Lukashenko protests in Belarus sparked by his victory in an election in 2020 that international observers claimed bogus. Then, three women lead the biggest ever popular protest in the history of the republic: Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a wife of imprisoned Lukashenko critic; Maria Kalesnikava, a flutist and political activist; and Veronika Tsepkalo, a wife of another Lukashenko’s opponent. Their unity became a symbol of resistance to Lukashenko’s rule and violent oppression of the dissent. Now, five years later, their fates turned out to be very different from each other. The film revisits these women now to find the answer: how do their personal changes over five years reflect the fate of Belarusians quest for freedom, crushed by Russian full scale invasion in Ukraine.