He claims to celebrates May 9 not only in Minsk but also in Moscow.
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In 2020, Belarus authorities seized approximately 135 kilograms of drugs and 47 kilograms of other illicit substances, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. For the same period, however, Austrian customs managed to confiscate seven times the amount at border crossings alone. Although one may consider Austrian authorities to be more effective than their Belarusian counterparts, Business Insider and the CIA consider Belarus to be located far from major drug routes as those mostly rely on sea transportation to reach lucrative destinations.
Some routes, however, do go through Belarus, and the country’s customs authorities have no power to help it. Ihar Loban, an ex- Superior Case Investigator, considers Belarus a drug transit country, rather than a drug destination. Hash, cocaine, and amphetamines often come from Western Europe after being smuggled from Latin America or Africa, while Belarus connects South Asian and Caucasian cocaine routes that go through Russia.
As to the local market, the situation may seem upbeat on paper. According to the Ministry of Health, there are approximately 15,000 drug users, representing less than one per cent of the total population, with only five per cent of all illicit substance abusers being underage. By contrast, Russia’s proportion of drug users to population is twice that of Belarus, with almost half a million people.
The authorities aimed to tackle the problem from two angles. Firstly, the government began updating its database of illicit substances at a much faster rate. The authorities introduced the term ‘base structure’ that enabled outlawing of multiple modifications of a single substance at once.
Secondly, the government significantly ramped up punishment for drug trade, increasing the upper limit to 25 years. For example, illicit trafficking with intent to sell became punishable by a three- to eight-year sentence.
For the last seven years, drug-related verdicts represented one half of all convictions in Belarus. By contrast, only ten per cent of all sentences passed in Russia involve drug offences.
Moreover, authorities passed legislation to lower the minimum conviction age for drug offences from 16 to 14 – making it the harshest in Europe.
- The focal point in curbing drug use and trafficking at a young age should be education delivered by youth psychologists at schools and other relevant institutions – says Yury Golosov, a Ukrainian legal counsel. – There certainly shouldn’t be criminal prosecution at an early age as it may destroy lives without any educational or correctional benefits to socialisation.
But illegal substance trade is not exclusively a teenage domain. Security officers are also attracted to the prospects of becoming rich. In January 2016, the Minsk Municipal Court heard the biggest case of them all – the Case of 17. At the time, 17 ex-police officers who had been drug trading for several years prior were being held in pre-trial detention. Among them was a drug lord Mr. Kanstantsin Viluha, two KGB officers Mr. Dzmitry Vieratsinsky and Mr. Ihar Karytsky, as well as an officer at the Main Directorate for Combatting Organised Crime and Corruption (MDCOCC) Mr. Kanstantsin Dzianisevich.
In total, the gang members were sentenced to over 200 years of imprisonment. But according to insiders, some ex-security officers were let go soon after the trial. Mr. Aliaksandr Azarau, an ex-MDCOCC’s Service Three officer, says Mr. Viliuga was bailed out by ex-Prime Minister Mr. Kokareu who was married to Mr. Viliuga’s mother, as well as an old mandarin Mr. Miasnikovich, another ex-Prime Minister.
Apart from enacting draconian legislation, in 2016 Mr. Lukashenka set out to make prison conditions unbearable for those convicted under Article 328 – another decision that goes against best policy practices.
In Iran, for instance, drug-related offences are punishable by death, and yet drug-related mortality rates are higher than in Belarus.
For instance, a third of offenders convicted under Article 328 are legally considered to be drug traffickers – which is far from the case in real life, according to Mr. Patsko.
– Imagine a person shares an illicit substance with someone at a party. According to the letter of the law, it is a grave drug trafficking offence. Yet, real drug trafficking involves organised transportation, distribution, manufacturing, and financing – things we should be fighting first and foremost, just like the rest of the world is doing. Instead, police officials like to improve their statistics at the expense of drug users who sometimes share substances between themselves. Thus, on paper authorities demonstrate excellent organised drug crime detection rate – says Mr. Patsko.
Mr. Patsko also notes that the Decree 6 was originally targeted at persons who drag children and adolescents into drug crime – “But we can’t fight those, so let’s intimidate the teenagers and ensure we penalise them as much as we can”.
At the same time, however, the real drug business in Belarus is flourishing, according to Mr. Alieh Kalinkau, a legal counsel.
To buy illegal substances or even get a job as a drug courier one only needs to check out apartment building stairwells, fences, and light poles in any large city in Belarus. Countless threats by the authorities to punish drug advertisers and dealers have so far yielded no result – says Mr. Kalinkau.
Perhaps, the biggest drug distribution channel is the internet, with Hydra spearheading a darknet revolution. The service was originally founded in Russia but soon gained popularity for its anonymous browser and cryptocurrency payment facilities. By 2019, Hydra had over 2.5 million users and a billion dollars in revenue over a four-year period.
Instant messengers are another avenue of drug trade. There is even a Telegram bot that connects buyers and sellers based on location. The bot can provide detailed payment instructions to the buyer, and upon payment – coordinates of a secret stash containing the goods. Recently, Belarusians have been appalled by the apparent number of people actively searching for such stashes in parks on the outskirts of Minsk.
Mr. Lukashenka keeps criticising his security apparatus for fighting the symptoms, rather than the cause of the disease. But in 2019, he himself admitted that his youngest son Nikalaj (a 15-year-old at the time) had already learnt how to purchase drugs over the dark net.
In the same year, penalties for drug crime eased to a degree. The authorities reduced the minimum punishment term by two years but kept the maximum unchanged. And yet, a holistic reform that would have addressed the root cause of the issue and redirected resources of security agencies away from focussing on punishing teenage drug use, has not taken place.
Mr. Lukashenka further announced an amnesty for prisoners convicted under Article 328 following international pressure as well as efforts of Mothers of 328, a Belarusian female movement founded by mothers of those convicted under Article 328 in reaction to harsh penalties for their sons. The movement had managed to put significant pressure on government officials as some mothers would even go on hunger strikes to raise awareness of the injustice.
Six years after Mr. Lukashenka announced his Decree 6 in 2014, only around 3,500 drug-related offences were recorded – a two-fold decrease from the time when the policy had been announced. For Lukashenka’s security apparatus the numbers look good on paper, however such a dramatic decrease can be explained by other factors – according to Mr. Kalinkau.
“[Pro-democracy] Protesters are largely drug addicts and alcoholics” – as Mr. Lukashenka’s old media narrative goes. Perhaps at some point Mr. Lukashenka became really convinced that democracy and drug use are related, and that it is possible to kill two birds with one stone.
