Former Belarusian special-police officer Yury Garavsky has told a Swiss appeal court that Alexander Lukashenko ordered the killing of three political opponents who disappeared in 1999.
Garavsky named the Belarusian president and former security council secretary Viktor Sheiman as the source of the order, in testimony reported by Viasna. His evidence has placed the disappearances of former interior minister Yury Zakharenko, former deputy prime minister Viktor Gonchar and businessman Anatoly Krasovsky at the centre of renewed scrutiny of the machinery of repression built under Lukashenko.
Testimony at the appeal hearing
The appeal hearing began in Switzerland on 22 September 2026 in the case of Garavsky, a former member of Belarus’s SOBR special police unit. He is accused of involvement in the abduction of the three men, who vanished in 1999 while Lukashenko was consolidating his rule.
At the hearing, Garavsky said the instruction to eliminate the abducted opponents came from Lukashenko and Sheiman. He alleged that the order was passed through Yury Sivakov, a former interior minister, and Dmitry Pavlichenko, the commander of SOBR. According to his account, the instruction was given orally.
Garavsky subsequently refused to answer questions from the victims’ lawyer and other participants in the proceedings. That decision is likely to remain significant to the court’s assessment of evidence, given that the first-instance proceedings had already highlighted contradictions in his testimony.
A previous acquittal
In 2023, a Swiss court acquitted Garavsky, citing inconsistencies in his statements and a lack of evidence. The same court nevertheless recognised that state structures might have been involved in the disappearances.
The appeal was brought by relatives of the victims. The prosecution later withdrew its own appeal, leaving the relatives to pursue the challenge to the earlier ruling. The proceedings therefore carry importance beyond the question of Garavsky’s individual criminal liability: they offer one of the few judicial settings in which alleged state responsibility for the disappearances has been examined.
The three men were prominent figures whose fate has remained unresolved. Zakharenko had served as Belarus’s interior minister, Gonchar as deputy prime minister, and Krasovsky was a businessman. Their disappearance has long been associated with allegations that security officials were used to remove opponents of the Belarusian president.
What the case says about Belarus’s system
Garavsky’s account directly implicates the highest level of the Belarusian state. It supports the assessment that orders to persecute and eliminate political opponents came from Lukashenko himself, while the country’s security bodies provided the means to carry them out.
The case also illustrates how that system has protected those accused of political violence. In Belarus, there has been no independent investigation and no prosecution of those responsible for the three disappearances. The absence of legal consequences has helped entrench a practice in which crimes committed to preserve the regime carry no apparent penalty for either their immediate perpetrators or the person alleged to have ordered them.
That impunity is central to the wider significance of the Swiss proceedings. Even if the appeal produces no definitive finding against every person named in Garavsky’s testimony, the hearing has brought the alleged chain of command into a public judicial process: from Lukashenko and Sheiman, through senior security officials, to the special-police unit said to have carried out the operation.
The unresolved question of accountability
The court must now weigh Garavsky’s renewed allegations against the weaknesses identified in the 2023 judgment, including the contradictions in his evidence and the lack of corroborating proof cited at that stage. The outcome will determine whether the case moves beyond a contested account of events towards a finding capable of challenging the long-standing impunity surrounding the disappearances.
Can proceedings in a foreign court deliver meaningful accountability when Belarus itself has refused to investigate the alleged crimes?
