CHRISTIAN VISION, an ecumenical NGO in Belarus, has reported a new crackdown on Christian communities: it says that church members of various denominations have been arrested or barred from the country.

“Under this authoritarian regime, a system of religious regulation has emerged that leads to regular state interference,” the organisation’s report says.

“Clergy are particularly vulnerable, as their loyalty is tested via the monitoring of social media, telephone contacts, sermons and prayers. Active believers are also subject to persecution for actions and words interpreted as crimes of disloyalty.”

An elderly parish priest from Alkovichi, the Revd Anatoly Parakhnevich, was arrested in mid-March by masked security officials, who sealed his residence and church, the report says; and two Evangelical pastors were arrested, together with an elderly Orthodox Christian, Irina Yakovleva, for “conspiracy to seize state power”.

The arrests have taken place as Alexander Lukashenko continues his seventh term as President, after 32 years in power, having an electoral victory in January last year of 86.8 per cent of the votes.

Dozens of clergy have been arrested since a previous ballot in 2020, which was followed by international sanctions and the flight of half a million citizens abroad.

Christian Vision says that dozens of religious communities have also been stripped of their legal status under a new law that prohibits activities deemed to infringe Belarus’s “sovereignty, constitutional system, and civil harmony”.

The organisation says that Christian communities face growing hardship from “transnational repression”, as President Lukashenko and the Russian President Putin help to supress each other’s critics.

A recently freed Evangelical, Viktor Babaryka, said that “torture through oblivion” posed a significant challenge to political prisoners.

A human-rights campaigner, Ales Bialiatski, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 while serving a ten-year sentence in a penal colony for “smuggling”, told the Church Times that political prisoners rarely heard about what was “said and done” on their behalf while they were incarcerated; but he said that they were “deeply grateful” for the support of diplomats and human-rights groups.