“After what happened with my father, it was clear that no change can be made in Belarus via elections. Any kind of participation in elections was an impulse for non-violent resistance. For people to take to the streets, to form mass protests. He [Lukashenko] killed people throughout the whole of his rule. The whole 26 years. Those who wanted to see did see that for the whole 26 years of the dictator’s reign, blood was shed and human lives were ruined. The blood started in small trickles. But following the events in August 2020 it flows like a river. Whoever says the Belarusian revolution is bloodless, is saying nonsense. Lukashenko has been shedding blood and killing his own nation the whole 26 years, along with those who disagree with his dictatorial policies. In 2010 the main trigger for my radicalism and even greater conviction that Lukashenko’s regime cannot be talked with, was the murder of my friend Aleh Byabenin, founder of the Charter 97 website. I vowed by his coffin in September that I would keep on until the end.”
“The trial began – the case against my father, Mikhail Marynich. The first thing that my lawyers managed to prove was that the same 90,000 dollars that had been found with Marynich had been used as physical evidence in several other cases in Belarus. The safe inside the office of the Brest investigator was to contain 20,000. The numbers of these banknotes figured in a corruption case at the Brest customs office. Ten thousand had been brought in from the Vitebsk Region. The money had been taken to the KGB, which planted it on my father. The court subsequently declared that the dollars were counterfeits and removed them from the case. The story was hushed up. The weapon was a similar story. A Glock 17 pistol. My brother and I commissioned a forensic analasys of particles, one of the first to be done in Belarus. If my father had had the weapon in his pocket, it would have had small particles on it. But there were no fingerprints, no particles on the weapon. They pulled the pistol as well. During this time we managed to prove that my father was being surveilled. Cars had been following him for a whole month.”
“It was clear to me that it was really dangerous. We knew the stories of the murders of Zakharanka, Krasouski, and Zavadski. The Prokuridis Report was published. No one doubted that Lukashenko was a murderer, a criminal, and a thief. They phoned me in the night and warned me not to go near my car – they had planted some ammo there. I grew up in that city, I have lots of friends in Minsk, even in the security services. Generally, I was advised to leave the city. Lukashenko used us children to keep my father in check. So I went to Moscow. The whole story came to a quick end. My older brother told me that my father was phoned by the now-deceased Mikalai Lazavik – he was friends with my father – and told him straight and clear: ‘Misha, there are instructions that they must not register you under any circumstances; you can collect a million signatures, but they won’t register you.’ And so it was. My father was not registered, just like Lazavik said. It was utterly clear to me that Lukashenko is a vindictive person and that this story was far from over. After the registration was denied, my father took a hard and clear stance. He moved into open opposition, into open confrontation with Lukashenko.”
Pavel Marynich was born in Yevpatoria, Ukraine, on 18 July 1970. His mother, Lyudmila Hryhovina Marynich (née Kozlovska), is a construction engineer originally from Yevpatoria. His father, Mikhail Afanasyevich Marynich (1940–2014), was a construction engineer, state official, diplomat, Belarusian opposition politician who was born in Stariya Halouchytsy in the Homyel Region in the former Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. Pavel attended Secondary School No. 20, the Minsk Technical Institute, and the All-Russian Academy of Foreign Trade in Moscow. He went into business. In 2001 his father was a candidate for the Belarusian presidential election, but he was not registered. He was subsequently charged with false accusations and sent to prison. Pavel defended his father’s innocence at the court, he funded the opposition, participated in protests. He hid in his friends’ homes to avoid arrest, and in 2010 he emigrated, fearing for his life. In Vilnius he renewed the activities of Charter 97 and met with leaders of the opposition. He graduated from Mykolas Romeris University in Lithuania. In 2020 he created an online system for monitoring the voting process, ZUBR (BYSON) and the YouTube news channel Malanka Media; he presented his findings about the 2020 election to the Lithuanian parliament, which consequently unanimously voted to not recognise the official results of the Belarusian presidential election and to refuse to acknowledge Alexander Lukashenko as the legitimate leader of Belarus.
