As the sun set over Soligorsk in early August, it looked as if Shaktar Soligorsk vs. Dinamo Brest was heading towards a drab 0 – 0. However, with ten minutes left on the clock, Shakhtar Striker Dmitry Postrelov received the ball with his back to goal, before successfully turning the defender and rifling home. Within minutes, chants of ‘Zhive Belarus’ (long live Belarus) rang out around the stadium, a pro-democracy motto adopted by the opposition to Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko. The next day, the Belarusian Football Federation (BFF) announced the postponement of a number of matches across the top three Belarusian leagues, without offering any formal explanation.
The turbulent year for Belarusian football started in April. As the only European league to continue playing despite the pandemic, the league made international headlines. Television rights to the Belarusian Premier League were sold to 11 countries across the world, and while the rest of Europe stayed at home, stadiums across Belarus remained open. Despite this, attendances dwindled, as fans feared attending games as COVID-19 gripped Europe. In a home fixture in early April, league leaders BATE Borisov, who averaged 5049 fans last year, had as little as 470 spectators attend.
Nevertheless, football continued amongst a backdrop of mistrust and misinformation. Empty stadiums served as a demonstration of the lack of trust fans had in the authorities’ advice, and off the field a larger storm was brewing. On August 9, Belarusians were to take to the polls. Aleksandr Lukashenko has ruled over the nation for the past 26 years. Having won Belarus’ first and last fair democratic election in 1994, Lukashenko has steered Belarus from the ashes of the Soviet Union to a modern-day dictatorship reliant on agriculture and cheap Russian energy. However, following the withdrawal of Russian subsidies in 2010, stagnation started to set in, and support for the strongman has wavered.
Enter coronavirus. As Lukashenko exited the rink after playing in an amateur ice hockey tournament in late March, he quipped ‘there are no viruses here’ continuing ‘do you see any floating around?’ The president’s wreckless approach to the virus caused anger among a populace that were still recovering from the economic woes of the last decade. Despite pleas from the World Health Organization to stop the Belarusian football leagues until the pandemic was under control, the nation was kept open and cases continued to soar. On April 13, Lukashenko declared, ‘Nobody is going to die of coronavirus in our country. I’m announcing this publicly. It’s my firmly held conviction.” Less than a month later, 135 people had succumbed to the virus.