Belarusian political prisoner Viktoria Kulsha, who was taken out of the country in December 2025 along with other detainees, has spoken about years of persecution, violence in prison and repeated extensions of her sentence. At the time of her expulsion, she had fractures of two cervical vertebrae and was transported from prison in a plaster brace.
According to Kulsha, on December 13, 2025, she was removed from the medical unit of women’s colony No. 4, where she had been brought the previous day from a regional hospital in Homyel. Shortly before that, on December 5, she had been charged again under Part 2 of Article 410 of Belarus’s Criminal Code, which carries a prison term of three to ten years. She says that by then she no longer believed she would ever be released.
“When they led me outside the prison gates, there was a minibus there, and people in balaclavas and camouflage were standing around it,” Kulsha recalled. She said she saw a person inside with a bag over his head and his hands tied, and thought she was being taken to be killed.
Buses carrying 109 political prisoners crossed the Ukrainian border, after which the group was taken to a military hospital in the Chernihiv region. There Kulsha asked doctors to remove the plaster brace, but they refused without MRI and CT results. She says fellow patients then helped her take it off. She is now receiving treatment in Poland.
Kulsha was detained on November 4, 2020, as an administrator of the Telegram chat “Drivers 97%.” She was initially charged under Article 361, but that case was closed for lack of evidence. A new case was then opened under Article 342, and on June 4, 2021, she was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. Her term was later repeatedly extended under Article 411: from 2022 through 2025, she was tried under that article four times.
Kulsha says the pressure was linked to her refusal to cooperate, admit guilt or sign documents for the security services, including the KGB and GUBOPiK. She also alleges that she, like other inmates, was subjected to physical violence in prison. In the interview, she further acknowledged that she had served on local election commissions three times in the past, including in 2010, and had taken part in election fraud.