On 3 September, Belarus saw an unusual legal precedent set. The court tried Alieh Halaŭko, the director of a branch of a Minsk district housing services, for answering an address written in Belarusian with Russian. According to the Law on Addresses of...
As the World Hockey Championship 2014 approaches, the organising committee and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Belarus announced that they plan to suspend the perplexing visa regime to facilitate tourist travel....
Establishing oneself as a foreigner in a new city can be a challenge, not only because of cultural and linguistic barriers, but also due to social norms. It’s often easier to meet and befriend fellow expatriates or members of the...
At the start of September, the Belarusian journal ARCHE reported that two monuments commemorating Konstanty Kalinouski, a revolutionary contested in the official Belarusian history, disappeared in a town near Hrodna.Konstanty Kalinouski remains a controversial figure, present in Belarusian, Lithuanian...
On 10 September, the world marked suicide prevention day. Belarus ranks sixth in the world with regard to the number of total suicides that occur annually.Last year, about two thousand Belarusians committed suicide - higher than the number of road...
Universities in the United States often bring to mind school spirit, frat parties and caffeine-fueled late nights studying at the library. I was not expecting the same situation in Belarusian universities, but I did hope for some semblance of...
A country where parachuting teddy bears and clapping in public are illegal? Where one in eight people is employed by the military or the police? Where nobody speaks English at all? Why would anyone want to go there? These...
In May the British organisation “Save the Children” published a ranking of the most and the least favourable countries for mothers. It ranked Belarus rather highly, placing it at 26th out of 176 countries, well ahead all other CIS...
On 20 August, a special police unit arrested two employees of the famous Shangri La Сasino. Investigators suspect them of organising a prostitution services to the casinos' VIP clients. A similar case happened in 2012, when employees of the elite...
Recently the head of the independent Union of Poles in Belarus, Mieczyslaw Jaskievicz made a controversial statement about Belarusian Catholics. In an interview given to Belarusian Partisan he related that he belongs to a Catholic Church with an exclusively...
Belarus Digest starts a new series of articles summarising what common Belarusians see on state television.The aim of the series is to help our readers understand how the Belarusian state media form public opinion in the country, which topics...
On 2 August, the “Occupy Pedophilia” group posted a new video online, which went viral on the Belarusian internet. In the video teenagers interrogated a potential pedophile, and in the end poured urine on his head.They call themselves “Occupy...
The Belarusian statistics agency has recently published the average salaries by region in June. Minsk city appeared as the leader with an average salary of $750. In second place was the Minsk region with an average of...
On 23-24 July Belarusian emigrants from 21 countries participated in the two-day Congress of Belarusians of the World in Minsk.It was a rare occasion where top state and churches officials as well as opposition politicians attended the same event. Organisers of...
