Belarusian Virginia Tech Student Sentenced to 10 Years in Absentia

The Virginia Tech doctoral student, tried in her native Belarus, has been found guilty in absentia of plotting to overthrow the government.

Katsiaryna Shmatsina was informed on Monday: she was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Luckily for her, she is in Alexandria. But the sentence means she will not be able to return home, at least not as long as the authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenko, often called “Europe’s last dictator,” is in power.

I wrote about her case last week. She is one of 20 Belarusian academics targeted by the regime. Those who follow the politics of the Eastern European country, which lies between Russia and Poland, have said the case is an example of how the regime is trying to silence dissent by excluding these analysts, many of them relatively young, from their home country. Shmatsina is 32.

She said some of her academic colleagues were also sentenced to 10 years in prison, others to 11 years, and one man to 11 years and six months. “It is unclear why one was sentenced to a longer term than the other,” Shmatsina told me via email.

Belarusian news website Euroradio reports that the 20 defendants were “found guilty of 'conspiracy to seize state power by unconstitutional means', 'joining an extremist group with the aim of committing extremist crimes', 'assisting public calls for actions aimed at harming the national security of the Republic of Belarus' and 'inciting social hostility and enmity'.”

It was not a trial in the Western sense. The defendants were not allowed to see their case files, and their court-appointed lawyers did not contact them. “The Minsk Regional Court also ignored our emails,” Shmatsina said. “We have not received any response.”

Viasna, the oldest human rights organization in Belarus, estimates that there are at least 1,410 political prisoners in the country. Shmatsina estimates that the figure is two to three times higher. “Some prisoners are reluctant to be labeled as ‘politically motivated.’ This creates additional pressure for them and their families,” she said. “The most recent tragic trend is that the public mention of a political prisoner in independent media or at a round table often leads to a worsening of prison conditions, as a form of retaliation. A few years ago, it was the other way around: giving prisoners more visibility behind bars meant that the prison administration would be more cautious with them, because these prisoners seemed to be ‘more important.’”

Shmatsina has applied for political asylum in the United States and was recently told her case would be processed within four months. “That’s a very good timeline,” she said. “Sometimes people wait years to get an interview to move their asylum case forward.”

After my first column was published, the congressional offices of Rep. Morgan Griffith, a Republican from Salem, whose district includes Virginia Tech, and Rep. Don Beyer, a Democrat from Alexandria, where Shmatsina lives, both offered to help with her case. So did a Washington, D.C.-based law firm, which offered its services pro bono.

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