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Protesters on the street in Minsk: It is the sixth Sunday in a row
Photo: Natalia Fedosenko / imago images / ITAR-TASS
"We do not forget, we do not forgive," read the small sign with black letters that an older man was holding up.
Security forces in green camouflage suits and helmets had gathered around him in Minsk.
Civil servants dragged protesters towards one of the infamous minibuses with no license plates.
They acted brutally, dragging a woman in a white top by one arm across the asphalt of the street, as pictures from various Belarusian media, including the Internet portal tut.by, showed.
Obviously, the security forces had been ordered to show severity early on in order to stop the protests from emerging.
But even if around 250 people were arrested on Sunday before the announced "March of the Heroes", the tactics of Lukashenko's regime did not work.
Up to 150,000 people marched peacefully in various columns through the Belarusian capital.
If the authoritarian ruler Alexander Lukashenko believed that he could demonstrate before his visit to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday that he had the situation on the street under control: He did not succeed.
Cat and mouse game with the security guards
Even six weeks after his fake election victory, the demonstrators proved tough.
They played a game of cat and mouse with the security forces in small groups.
Most of them are now in action without national emblems or in civilian clothes.
Which also shows how nervous the officers are, who wear masks, hats and hoods in order not to be recognized.
Again and again protesters recently pulled masks from officials' faces in order to photograph them and thus to identify them more easily.
The names, addresses and telephone numbers of the employees of Lukashenko's security authorities are published via a special Telegram channel.
The demonstrators hooked themselves up again on Sunday to better protect themselves from arbitrary attacks by officials.
Compared to a few weeks earlier, when the protesters were still receiving police officers and Omon special officers shouting "The police or Omon is with us", the tone has changed noticeably.
"Shame," the people shouted, trying to defend themselves against attacks by the security forces, trying to help each other.
The officers were also armed with batons and, according to the pictures, often targeted participants who carried the forbidden white, red and white flag of the country with them.
The water strategy
The goal of the march on Sunday was only announced at short notice by Telegram channels, including the popular Nexta channel.
This time it went to the elite district of Drosdy.
Lukashenko has a residence there, and other high officials of his regime also live in the district.
In fact, many of the protesters made it in columns from different directions to the entrance of the district.
The mobile internet was disrupted again, which made coordination with each other, also through Telegram, difficult.
The Minsk poet Dimitrij Strotsew recently compared the demonstrator's tactics with running water: "Just as the Minsk marches of hundreds of thousands come together, from the drops of the backyards, the streams of the streets, into a human ocean," he wrote in a poem on Facebook .
Shots in the air
Lukashenko's special forces blocked access to the elite district.
In the vicinity, masked security officers who acted like thugs chased individual demonstrators.
Shot noises could be heard on videos, smoke from stun grenades rose.
That was the case on the evening of the election on August 9th.
The Interior Ministry denied their use on Sunday but admitted gunshots.
According to different images, the officers fired in the air.
That also happened in another part of the city, where an officer had a rifle in his hand, as video images showed.
The Interior Ministry spokeswoman said that 400 demonstrators had been arrested in Minsk alone by early evening.
However, there were also protests in 16 other cities: In Brest, near the Polish border, there were thousands of people, here the security forces also used water cannons.
The authorities are now reporting hundreds of arrests every weekend.
The security authorities are acting more and more aggressively against the Lukashenko critics, even if they have not yet reached the level of violence as they did on the days after the election.
At that time, they beat people, arrested thousands within a few days, tortured and ill-treated those detained.
Several people were seriously injured and some are still missing.
Many of the injured showed their bruised and injured bodies on social media.
To date, not a single case has been initiated against any of the officers.
The signals from Moscow seem to have arrived
Putin, on the other hand, described the Belarusian police's action at the end of August as "cautious".
This statement is probably one of the reasons why Lukashenko once again dared to crack down on the demonstrators in the past few weeks.
After the pictures of up to 150,000 protesters in Minsk alone, he is weakened in talks with the Russian President.
There will be no press conference at the meeting in Sochi, there was talk of a short working visit by the Belarusian ruler in the Kremlin.
But for him, a common picture with Putin is already a success, as it signals support.
Lukashenko could then announce the exact date of his inauguration, it would be his sixth.
Without protests this will certainly not take place.
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