Svetlana Tichanovskaya has been living in exile for three years – and from there she is leading the resistance against the regime in Belarus. Her husband is in custody. She hardly has time for her children. A conversation about the price of the freedom struggle.
The freedom of Belarus is defended from an office. It is on the seventh floor of a new, black-glazed building in the north of the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. In the anteroom, the shelves are bursting with honors and gifts that Svetlana Tichanovskaya has received on numerous trips. Underneath, behind glass, in a prominent place: the Aachen Charlemagne Prize, which she was awarded in 2022 together with her fellow campaigners Marija Kolesnikova and Weronika Zepkalo, a year before the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj.