Opposition leader commemorates 160th anniversary of Kastuś Kalinoŭski’s uprising

January 22, BPN. The 1863 uprising in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth unites the people of Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine because their predecessors stood up against the Russian Empire, said Belarusian opposition leader Sviatłana Cichanoŭskaja.

They “refused to live under the oppression of occupiers and rose up to defend their land and their dignity,” she said at the commemoration ceremony at the Rasų cemetery in Vilnius, where the remains of uprising leader Kastuś Kalinoŭski and 19 other insurgents were reburied in 2019.

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and the Polish and Ukrainian envoys to Lithuania, Urszula Doroszewska and Petro Beshta, also attended the ceremony.

Recent events in Belarus and Ukraine show that the “empire is knocking on our doors again, seeking to destroy or subdue us,” Cichanoŭskaja noted.

“The strength that our fellow countrymen found in themselves to resist the Russian Empire, even at the cost of their own lives, is the strength they have passed on to us a century and a half later,” she said.

The heroes of the 1863 uprising still inspire Belarusians to “resist the tyrannical regime of [Alaksandr] Łukašenka and the imperial aggression of Russia,” the politician said.

Belarusians should be masters of their own country, she added, referring to Kalinoŭski’s vision of Belarus being free from foreign powers.

Belarusian volunteers of the Kalinoŭski regiment fight Russia in Ukraine, the Kalinoŭski program supports Belarusian students in Poland, while friends of free Belarus gather every year at the Kalinoŭski Forum in the Lithuanian Seimas, Cichanoŭskaja said.

Every Belarusian family has its own Kalinoŭski, a person who “inspires you to fight and does not let you quit, even if it seems that there is no hope anymore,” she said. “We cannot betray the dreams that unite us and our heroes. We cannot betray their memory. We cannot and do not have the right to stop fighting for our home.”

“Even though tragic history is repeating itself, and today our nations are once again forced to confront a vast empire, I know that we will win and we will all return home,” Cichanoŭskaja said. “I also know that Belarus will soon return to the European family, to which it belongs historically.”