‘Most of us simply don’t know what to do’

Two decades ago, Belarus forced a top university into exile. Now, the Lukashenko regime is targeting its students.

Since the start of June, the Belarusian authorities have raided the homes of at least 60 people affiliated with a university in Lithuania, according to the human rights group Viasna. European Humanities University (EHU), once a symbol of Belarus’s European future, was forced to relocate from Minsk to Vilnius in 2004 after the Belarusian Education Ministry revoked its licence. The school has operated abroad for the last 22 years, but now the Lukashenko regime is mounting a new crackdown against its students, graduates, and former professors. Novaya Gazeta Europe tells the story of EHU, its expulsion from Belarus, and the government's latest campaign against it.

European Humanities University was one of Belarus's first private universities. Opened in 1992, the school started out with eight departments, including theology, which was unusual and novel for a post-Soviet state. The Belarusian Orthodox Church provided a kind of institutional backing, lending legitimacy to the new institution. At the time, no one imagined it would lose its licence, or that Belarus would become a presidential republic and then a dictatorship.

“I enrolled in EHU's arts department in 1998, during its golden years,” recalls art historian and curator Elvira Koroleva. “We all wanted something innovative. The word 'European' was like a magnet. State universities felt like bastions of Soviet academicism, while here was something European and humanistic.”

Koroleva recalls a curator who had worked with artist Marc Chagall's granddaughter bringing her along on a visit to Minsk — a hands-on experience that “gave students more than lectures ever could”. “Of course,” she adds, “having theology taught in departments unrelated to religious studies was strange. I still remember a priest giving me a B for a prayer recitation.”

“Students at EHU were confident that even without the classical education offered at state universities, they'd emerge as sought-after specialists who would clearly understand the contemporary world and where it’s heading.”

EHU's education was considered an “export product”, meaning graduates could count on finding work abroad. Two buildings in the city centre, plus a diocesan building handed over by the Church for the theology department, gave the university more space than most. But it wasn't just expanding in square meters.

Thanks to the French Embassy, a Franco-Belarusian Department opened in 1993. It was followed by a Centre for American Studies in 1995, then an Institute of German Studies in 1997. The MacArthur Foundation funded a gender studies centre; the Open Society Institute funded building renovations. Prosperity seemed to seep through the university's walls. The Church patronised it. Its future seemed secure.

“We were convinced that nothing could happen to EHU,” Koroleva recalls.

“Partly because so many children and mistresses of officials studied there. We took that as a good sign... We knew academic circles didn't much like us, but the idea that the university could be shut down never crossed our minds.”

‘Bring back EHU’

On 27 July 2004, Belarus's Education Ministry revoked EHU's licence to provide educational services. The ministry claimed the university had failed a routine inspection because it “did not meet the requirements for university-type institutions,” basing instruction instead on “experimental curricula that do not conform to higher-education standards”.

Alexander Lukashenko soon explained the real reasoning. During a trip to Brest that September, he told students that EHU's foreign lecturers, study-abroad opportunities, and European diplomas had been merely “the external facade”. The real, unspoken agenda, he said, was to train “a new Belarusian elite” in the centre of Minsk that would lead the country toward the West — leaving the rest of Belarus's universities, he suggested, to train nothing more than “servants” for that elite.

The day after the licence was revoked, students protested outside the university with signs reading “Bring back EHU” and “EHU is our home”. On 2 August, they staged a sit-in on Minsk's October Square, reading books outside to send a simple message: they would keep studying, even if they had to do it in the street.

But the school didn't stay on the street — Lithuania took it in. Professors adapted to commuting, living in Minsk but travelling to Vilnius on a rotating schedule to teach before returning home. The theology department, backed by the Orthodox Church, transferred in its entirety to Belarusian State University.

“EHU sold Europe to Belarus, and Belarus to Europe,” says Maxym Zhbankov, a prominent Belarusian culturologist and former EHU lecturer. But Orthodoxy, he notes, “doesn't sell well in Europe” — hence the theologians stayed behind.

Nothing else changed much: according to Zhbankov, what moved to Lithuania wasn't just a university but an entire administrative culture that felt no need to reform itself, content to sustain its “authoritarian” management style while marketing its own “Belarusian otherness”. This formula, he says, “sold very well” precisely because it tapped into a simple political appeal: that it was helping the regime's victims.

Since victims of the regime weren’t so numerous in 2004, the world rushed to help EHU. Donors included the European Commission, the Nordic Council of Ministers, and the governments of Lithuania, Poland, Estonia, and the US, among others. In 2017, the building of a former Augustinian monastery in Vilnius's Old Town was donated to the university.

“Talk that the university wasn’t developing, that the quality of education was declining, and that the administration had brought with it a totalitarian management style as its chief inheritance was suppressed and never aired publicly,” Zhbankov says. “If Lukashenko was railing against EHU from the podium, the logic went, don’t be like Lukashenko — don’t criticise.”

Cracks in the facade

Even so, details of the university's inner workings — reminiscent of the very system it had fled — occasionally surfaced through. In 2014, EHU fired a group of professors who had formed a faction called For a New EHU to reform the administrative culture. Among those dismissed was the chair of the university senate, Pavel Tereshkovich, along with Maxym Zhbankov himself.

“We were just trying to secure basic protections for faculty rights,” Zhbankov recalls. As an example, he notes that female colleagues who had children while working at EHU received neither maternity leave nor the payments they were entitled to — but that, tellingly, things improved for those who stayed on after the dissenters were pushed out.

“So we served as expendable material,” he says. “It was a minority protest on behalf of the majority. You could say it was a rough draft of what happened across all of Belarus in 2020, when democratic institutions... were destroyed everywhere.”

After the firings, EHU's senate was reduced from a governing body to a purely advisory one. Lithuania's higher education oversight body flagged the leadership for unlawful decisions, but the practice of firing dissenters continued. On 1 October 2019, students opened the academic year with a protest of their own, reviving the 2004 slogan “Bring back EHU!” — this time addressed not to Lukashenko, but to the university's own administration. Their demands were for the school to reinstate fired professors, restore the senate's authority, make personnel decisions transparent, and reverse a tuition hike of €400 per semester.

Then 2020 arrived, and the fight for rights spilled far beyond the university's walls as all of Belarus rose in protest. EHU itself, now beyond the reach of Belarusian security services, couldn't be shut down again — but many students who returned home for the summer found themselves at the infamous Okrestina detention centre for joining the marches.

‘There are no clear instructions’

On 14 April 2026 — when it seemed nearly everyone who could be jailed already had been — Belarus's Supreme Court declared EHU an “extremist organisation”. Prosecutors alleged the university had cooperated with “terrorist and extremist organisations” aiming to undermine Belarus's “independence, territorial integrity, sovereignty, constitutional order, and public security”, pointing to criminal cases against its lecturers and graduates involving “incitement of social hostility”, “conspiracy to seize state power”, and other serious charges.

The ruling triggered a fresh round of searches and criminal cases.

“It actually started before April,” says EHU student Leonid (name changed). Even before the school year began, a Belarusian court had already labelled EHU's website and social media “extremist materials”, prompting students to scrub their browser histories and leave group chats before crossing the border. But once the university itself was declared extremist, he says, there was no comparable response from the administration — just a statement from the rector condemning the ruling. In the meantime, students have been left largely on their own, trading advice in chats about hiding bank transactions and asking parents to destroy university paperwork at home.

“Most of us simply don't know what to do,” Leonid says, “because there are no clear instructions.” Home searches, he adds, have reportedly reached graduates as far back as 2019, and even students who were expelled.

Belarusians once made up 95 percent of EHU's student body. Now, that figure has dropped to 74 percent, according to the rector, with Russians and a small number of Kazakhstanis filling the rest. Whether the ruling will touch students from Russia or Kazakhstan remains unclear. For Belarusians, there's no ambiguity: extremism charges carry sentences of up to six years.

‘What kind of anonymity can there be?’

On 28 May, EHU rector Vilius Šadauskas met with Belarusian civil society representatives at Lithuania's Foreign Ministry to discuss what he called the “grim situation” following the extremism designation. Among those present was Siarhei Sparysh, a former political prisoner who served five years for “mass riots”.

“When I heard that EHU is very careful about protecting its students' anonymity, it really rubbed me the wrong way,” Sparysh says.

“What anonymity is there in this day and age? ...University representatives said that after EHU was declared an extremist organisation, the school withdrew documentation for more than 100 students. But Belarusian law applies retroactively. If security forces come with searches targeting people who graduated even before 2020, voluntary withdrawal from the university won’t change anything. Statements about protecting students’ anonymity sound, at best, irresponsible.”

Two decades ago, EHU seemed like a shocking anomaly. Today, that trajectory has become the norm. Since 2020, Belarus has shut down several more private universities and nearly all private schools; Russia has labelled the entire International Baccalaureate system an “undesirable organisation” and dismantled university Liberal Arts programmes. Arrests of professors and students are now routine in both countries. Émigré educational institutions are no longer a unique phenomenon — and neither is transnational repression.