Why a regiment of Belarusian dissidents is fighting for Ukraine

were in front of them. The Russians were behind them. It was, says Aliaksandr Naukovich, as if “the war [were] saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’” His unit, a ragtag battalion of Belarusian dissidents, had lived a charmed existence until then, surviving four months of fighting with only a few casualties. But the news coming through was not good. The battalion’s charismatic leader, Ivan Marchuk, was dead following an operation to stop an incursion by Russian tanks near Lysychansk, in the Donbas region. Two men were in Russian captivity, three others missing in action. Four months earlier, the 33-year-old former children’s entertainer had been living in Poland. He had fled there, like many fellow dissidents, after Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s despot, rigged a presidential election in 2020 and crushed the resulting protests by rounding up and torturing the protesters.