As part of her working visit to Romania, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya spoke at the Congress of the European People’s Party today along with the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola. Ms. Tsikhanouskaya spoke about the dire situation with Belarusian political prisoners and called for maximum efforts to keep the issue on the international agenda.
Here are the key quotes from the leader’s speech.
📌 “And our moral obligation is to fight for them. I know that they count on us. And they count on you. We should make their release our priority and our commitment. Obviously, we don’t have a key to prisons. But we have other tools. If the regime knows that for every death, for every illegal detention, it will be taken into account – the situation could be very different”.
📌 “The regime is doing everything possible to make political prisoners feel abandoned. It forces their relatives to publicly denounce children, sisters, and brothers as enemies of the state. We read it in books about Stalin’s times, but we never believed it would be possible in the 21st century”.
📌 “I will never stop repeating how much I admire women leaders like you. If Lukashenka was in this room, he would probably have a heart attack. In his obsolete worldview, the place for a woman is in the kitchen to cook borshch, but not in politics. Lukashenka often repeats: “I don’t fight with women”. However, this is exactly what he does”.
