One year ago, Father Andrej Bulchak, a Catholic priest with Polish citizenship, fled Belarus, a country where he had worked for 14 years. He was petrified of government persecution. His crime? He had produced an anti-war video about a young Belarusian girl who wanted to tell the people of Poland that the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine was not supported by their neighbors, the people of Belarus. The priest described the two-minute recording as “a cry of a young person for a free Ukraine.” That was enough to send him packing.

Bulchak’s case is not unique. On the day Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine began, another Catholic priest, Father Alexander Baran, posted a photo of the Ukrainian flag and the flag of the Belarusian opposition movement on social media. He was subsequently arrested, charged with “illegal picketing” and the “dissemination of extremist materials” and sentenced to 10 days in prison. Around the same time, Father Andrei Kevlich, another Belarusian Catholic priest, was detained and later fined for reposting content about the war from banned independent media. 

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has tightened the space for the Catholic Church and its priests in Belarus to criticize the government and its authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Although the clampdown on the Church began soon after the rigged presidential election in August 2020, which saw Lukashenko claim 80% of the vote, the Belarusian regime has taken advantage of the attention given to the war in Ukraine to gain an even greater hold over a key religious institution in Belarusian society. 

It has also proved to be an opportunity to end what the Belarusian government believes is a dangerous pocket of Western influence in a country that allows the Russian military to use its territory to wage its war on Ukraine.