Four years ago, Viachaslau Hranouski watched on as Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s dictator for three decades, emerged from a helicopter and approached the security forces shielding him from a vast crowd of furious protesters in central Minsk.
“Guys, you’re awesome,” Lukashenko shouted at Hranouski and the rest of the police cordon.
“There I was, protecting the man who had hijacked the country,” Hranouski said, recalling those events. “That was the moment I understood I didn’t want to be part of it any more.”
The realisation that he was part of the repressive machine of a dictatorial regime set Hranouski on the path that eventually brought him to where he is today: the frontlines in Ukraine. He now believes that fighting Russia is the best way to fight Lukashenko, the leader he once served.
“Lukashenko is my enemy now,” he said in an interview with the Observer conducted via video call from Kharkiv, where the unit of Belarusians he fights for is stationed. “The only reason he’s still in power is because of Russia. And the only way to defeat him is to fight Putin.”
Photograph: Sergei Ilnitsky/AFP/Getty Images
Although the Belarusian army has not been deployed in Ukraine, Lukashenko allowed Vladimir Putin’s troops to enter the country through Belarus in February 2022, making it a co-aggressor in the war. Since then, integration between Moscow and Minsk has accelerated, with Belarus now, in effect, a Russian proxy.
On the other side of the frontline, the Kastuś Kalinoŭski regiment, made up of hundreds of Belarusians, fights on the side of Ukraine. They range from former IT specialists to police officers such as Hranouski.
Sitting in his military uniform, he took deep breaths and regular drags on a stream of cigarettes as he reflected on everything he left behind in Belarus – work, family and friends. His younger self would have laughed at the thought of making such a drastic decision because of politics.
Hranouski recalled how he signed up for a career in law enforcement at the age of 18, immediately after graduating from high school. “For many young men who don’t care about politics but want a stable life, joining the police is a good option,” he said.
By 2020, when protests erupted after rigged presidential elections, he was 21 and, by his own admission, mostly focused on “girls, parties and having a good time”.
Lukashenko’s regime relies heavily on the security forces, whose members receive a stable salary and are taught to revere both Lukashenko and Russia – Belarus’s “big brother”. Hranouski got along well with his colleagues, sharing the day-to-day burden of being a policeman – resolving petty neighbourhood disputes and maintaining order.
But when he looks back now, Hranouski is dismissive of many of the people with whom he served. “They’re not particularly smart and they don’t critically analyse information. Most of them don’t have principles. In fact, that’s almost a requirement to work for this system.”
When the protests began in August 2020, Hranouski saw his colleagues torturing and mocking protesters to prop up the regime. Triggered by accusations of election fraud, the protests brought hundreds of thousands of Belarusians on to the streets nationwide. In the first days alone, many were detained, tortured and crammed into overcrowded cells. Detainees emerged from temporary detention centres covered in bruises from the abuse they endured.
Hranouski recalled the scene he encountered at the Frunzensky district police department in Minsk, where he worked, after a night of protest rallies. There he found about 70 screaming demonstrators, bloodied and bruised, lying bound on the ground with zip ties, having been beaten with batons on their arms and backs by colleagues he had often joked and smoked with.
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“I had to detain people before, but I always did it without violence. During my service, there was often room to avoid brutality,” Hranouski claimed. “But at that moment… I saw an absolutely animalistic response to peaceful protests.
“I used to think that, as police, we do some good. That moment proved I was wrong.”
On 16 August 2020, Minsk witnessed the largest protest to date, with more than 200,000 citizens flooding on to the streets to demonstrate against the dictatorship. “It was unbelievable – I was standing in the police cordon, looking at this sea of people, thinking they would sweep us away and we’d drop our shields. But they turned back,” Hranouski said sadly. “That was the moment I realised the revolution had failed and things would only get worse.”
He resigned from the police in September that year. He was allowed to leave the force, but the authorities were relentless in persecuting any ex-colleagues who dared to challenge the regime. Over the following months, Hranouski received a tip-off from his contacts within the system that a criminal case was being prepared against him.
He packed his documents and belongings and decided to flee to Kharkiv, as he had a friend who lived there. Back then, before the full-scale war, it was still possible to cross the border to Ukraine by bus.
Once in Kharkiv, Hranouski joined the Ukrainian army, prepared to fight against Russia. What he did not expect was that, in 2022, Belarus would become a co-aggressor in the conflict, with many of his former colleagues still standing by the regime’s side.
In September that year, he joined the Kastuś Kalinoŭski regiment after its troops shared their vision of fighting not only for Ukraine but also for a Belarus free from dictatorship.
The regiment’s mission states that it hopes for the “liberation of Belarus through the liberation of Ukraine”, believing that Ukrainian victory in the war would trigger the collapse of the Putin regime and, by extension, the Lukashenko dictatorship in Belarus.
Since he joined, Hranouski has fought in dozens of frontline battles, survived the siege of Bakhmut and lost four close friends on the battlefield.
Lukashenko’s government recently declared the Kastuś Kalinoŭski regiment a terrorist organisation and began detaining the relatives of those serving in Ukraine. In Belarus, Hranouski faces multiple criminal charges, including for mercenary activity, participating in an extremist organisation and high treason.
Most of his former colleagues consider him a traitor. Hranouski suggests it is because independent thought is not allowed inside the police, only blind obedience of orders.
“Everyone is focused on their own wellbeing. In Belarus, the average policeman earns about 900 Belarusian rubles [£210] a month – just enough to rent a one-bedroom flat in Minsk and buy food. It’s no surprise that many frustrated, small-minded people would turn on each other for a tiny bonus,” he said.
He tried to maintain contact with a few “reasonable” ex-friends, but eventually the communication faded, he said. Now their shared past in Belarus no longer matters, and he said it does not bother him that there could be former comrades on the other side of the lines. “I watched my Ukrainian brother get torn apart right in front of me at the beginning of the invasion. Why would I care about those who support the killers?”