Aliaksandr was born in Brest in 1983 on 15 October. He has been in activism for twenty years – he was involved in human rights and trade union activities, participated in various kinds of grassroots initiatives.

Political views

Anarchist.
Aliaksandr became interested in anarchist ideas in his youth, studied the history of anarchism, began to apply the principles of equality, mutual aid. He always shows an active civic position in many social and political events in his hometown and in the country as a whole.

The history of detention and the case

March 2, 2021 in Brest a number of activists and young people, who were probably on the list of Main Department for Combating Organized Crime as politically unreliable, were detained. During the week Aleksandr Kozlyanko, Andrey Marach, Pavel Shpetny, Nikita Dranets, Daniil Chul’, Aleksey Golovko were detained.

Each of the detainees was charged with gross violation of order (Art. 342) and participation in an international criminal organisation (Art. 285.2).

It later became clear that the activists Akikhiro Gaevsky-Khanada, Andrey Chepyuk i Aleksandr Frantskevich, detained back in August-September 2020, and human rights activist Marfa Rabkova were also charged with the same case.
By the beginning of the trial the majority of the detained were charged under three-dozen articles of the Criminal Code. The grounds for the charges were the anarchists’ actions against the battery factory (blocking the Brest-Minsk highway), the participation of anarchists in the march of Non-sclackers in Brest in 2017 and graffiti. Interestingly, at one time the march of Non-slackers was qualified as a mass event and some anarchists received an administrative arrest for it. For some reason, 4 years later, they decided to initiate a criminal case.

Sentence

On April 25, 2022 in Minsk city court the hearing of the “international criminal organization” of anarchists began. According to the investigation, the activists of the Revolutionary Action in Belarus, Revolutionary Freedom in Ukraine and People’s Self-Defense in Russia created a criminal organization to undermine the regimes.

On September 6, 2022, Judge Sergey Hripach pronounced the verdict to the 10 defendants in the case of international criminal organization.
Aliaksandr was sentenced to 6 years in a reinforced regime colony and a fine of about €5,600.

Detention conditions

During the investigation, Aliaksandr changed several cells in the pre-trial detention centre, and everywhere he found a common language with his cellmates. He wrote that he met many and very different people there, most of them are adequate people. During the same period he was transferred for a week to the Republican Centre of Mental Health for a forced psychiatric examination.

After the appeal of the verdict Aliaksandr was transferred to the penal colony No. 1 in Navapolatsk, where he has to work a lot at the sawmill – there is a constant fatigue from the exhausting, monotonous, harmful work. There is no time and energy at all to read books, write poems, stories, which Sasha liked to do in freedom and when he was in the pre-trial detention centre.

From the first days of his arrival in the colony Aliaksandr was obliged to wear a yellow label as “prone to extremism and other destructive actions” (such labels are worn by all political prisoners), which means that the prisoner is treated in a special way and more severe conditions of the sentence.

Relatives

Aliaksandr’s family – his mother, father and brother – is waiting for him at home.
His friends and comrades are also waiting for him at freedom.

---