Kastuś Kalinoŭski Regiment wants Śviatłana Cichanoŭskaja to recognize it as political force

February 3, BPN. Opposition politician Śviatłana Cichanoŭskaja’s team should “acknowledge” the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Regiment, its commander Dzianis Procharaŭ has told LRT in an interview.

Procharaŭ said that back in the day when the Belarusian volunteer unit was being created in Ukraine, its members faced a lack of understanding from Cichanoŭskaja’s office.

The regiment had been quiet about politics for a long time, keeping its opinion about Cichanoŭskaja’s cabinet out of sight, although it saw its members “going in the wrong direction,” he added.

Although her team had significant resources, it only helped the regiment “minimally.” “We understood how ‘interested’ they were in us,” he said.

“When we saw them making a lot of mistakes, we realized it was time to open our own vector in politics as we see it,” Procharaŭ continued. “That’s why we started meeting with politicians. We even had a request from the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. They wanted to communicate with us as official representatives of the Belarusian people, because we are the ‘transparent’ guys.”

“They [Cichanoŭskaja’s team] need to acknowledge us, because it confuses a lot of Belarusians: they don’t understand why we have two separate political agendas, why we don’t unite,” he said. “Now we have launched our own unification: [hacktivist group] Cyberpartisans has already joined us, and we are making our own structure.”

Procharaŭ went on to say that the regiment defends Ukraine “in the hope that it will help us too, because we have the mirror situation.” “There will be no free Belarus without free Ukraine, and no free Ukraine without free Belarus,” he argued.

The regiment is not trying to say that “everybody is bad and we are the only good guys,” he added: “We say that there are many positions. There are Śviatłana Cichanoŭskaja, her office and Pavieł Łatuška, and there are us.”

The military leader said he understands the importance of Cichanoŭskaja’s work: “She meets with many leading foreign politicians. It is in her power to establish contacts with them. At these meetings, she even told them about our regiment.”

On December 1, Cichanoŭskaja told a security forum in Kyiv that the Kalinoŭski regiment is one of the manifestations of Belarusian support for Ukraine.

On January 22 in Vilnius, commemorating the 160th anniversary of the January Uprising, she said that the regiment’s fighters “defend the honor of Belarus on the battlefields of Ukraine.”