She had been one of the faces of the demonstrations that rocked Belarus in the summer of 2020, before leaving to fight alongside the Ukrainian army a few months after the Russian invasion triggered, in 2022. January 17, then that she had just celebrated her 24e Birthday, Maria Zaitseva was killed by a Russian artillery shot, while she was fighting in the Pokrovsk sector in the east of the country. Monday, February 3, hundreds of civilians and soldiers gathered knee on the ground against the coffin of the young woman, in a cemetery in the suburbs of kyiv. Among them, many Belarusians carrying flowers, for some the masked face, for fear of reprisals against their families who have remained in the country.
“We were both in Minsk on August 9, 2020”says with emotion a bearded Belarusian named Maxime, living today in kyiv after having fled his country. The man remembers this first evening of big demonstration against the fraudulent re -election of Alexandre Loukachenko, the Belarusian president, to a sixth term.
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Source: Lemonde