Vilnius, 22nd October 2025,
My name is Aliaksandr Yaroshevich. I’m an investigative journalist currently living in Vilnius. I moved here four years ago because working as a journalist in my home country, Belarus, became impossible. I was forced to choose between prison and freedom. So, I decided to choose freedom and to continue working.
I made that decision four years ago now, it was the start of summer. The country’s major newspapers had already been shut down (at the time, the highly popular news platform TUT.BY and the website of one of the country’s oldest newspapers, Nasha Niva, had been blocked, ed.), and they were starting to target other media outlets of all kinds.
Since the winter of 2020-2021, I had been living in a constant state of stress, fearing every day, that they would come and take me away. I would wake up in the morning and look at the clock, thinking, “Ok, it’s already eight o’clock, they usually come early in the morning, so it’s not today, thank God. I probably won’t be detained today”.
There was a time when I lived in a colleague’s country house with my phone turned off. I even removed the battery so that they couldn’t track my movements, because we had been told we were being targeted.
Then the police came to our studio while we were filming our programme and arrested the technicians and cameramen. After that, we kept a low profile.
So by the summer of 2021, I desperately needed to distract myself somehow. We decided to go on holiday to Ukraine. We went to Odessa at the beginning of July, to the sea, with a rucksack filled with beach stuff, flippers and so on. But all we did on the beach was check our newsfeeds to see which of our colleagues had been arrested. There was a new wave of repression underway in Belarus. In the end, it wasn’t much of a holiday, more like a nightmare. We just couldn’t stop thinking about it.
And while we were on holiday, my boss called me to say: “Listen, maybe you should go straight from Odessa to Vilnius? Don’t take any chances”. They got us tickets, and the same day we took a plane from Odessa to Vilnius. The police arrested all my colleagues, shortly after they visited my place, then my wife’s, and searched them in our absence.
If we had been in Belarus at that moment, if we had been there, crossing the border, we would have been arrested right there and then. We realised that, at least for the moment, the road back to Belarus was closed to us until things improved.
The situation regarding freedom of speech in Belarus is really bad. It’s suffocated. About 40 of my colleagues from various independent media outlets are in prison for simply doing their jobs. And in other Belarusian medias you won’t find any criticism of the authorities or the government. It’s currently impossible to do this from within the country.
So, that’s how we arrived in Vilnius, with our flippers, and we’ve been living here for four years now. “туга па радзіме” (“longing for your homeland” in English, ed.)… For me, it’s the people I miss the most. My relatives, close friends, sisters, parents, my mother-in-law.
But if we go back to Belarus, we’ll be detained at the border immediately. I’ve been put on the international wanted list. Independent journalism in Belarus is considered extremism, something dangerous. Our activities are declared ‘undesirable’. All the media outlets I have worked for in recent years are recognised in Belarus as extremist groups. So I’m a four-time member of extremist groups.
So as I said, I had a choice: either go to prison or be free and continue my work. I chose the second option, to leave Belarus, even though it was a painful decision, to live in another country, and to continue to tell people the truth. And people need that truth.
Aliaksandr
