Why The Regime Is Killing Victoria Kulsha

• Irina Khalip
• 13.06.2025, 10:40

They don't forgive that kind of thing.

Victoria Kulsha received her fourth verdict this week. More precisely, a total of five. Four under Article 411 and one, the very first, under the "people's" article. And on that first sentence, Victoria was given two and a half years in a penal colony. And then four more - one by one, slowly, every year, shortly before her release, she was taken to the pre-trial detention center on the next case of disobedience to the administration.

And at first Victoria Kulsha tried to follow the rules of internal order, back in Gomel colony for "first-timers". Just once she accidentally did not fasten the bottom button of her coat, and it led her first to the penal colony, then to the pre-trial detention center with a new charge. And when from the pre-trial detention center she tried to send a complaint to the Prosecutor General's Office, the prison guards, in their own words, "lost" the complaint. And then Kulsha went on her first hunger strike. This was the beginning of her desperate resistance, which stretched over four years of torture and abuse, SHIZO and PKT, stages and sentences.

In the pre-trial detention center, Kulsha was not provided with medical care when she started uterine bleeding - they said they would send her to the hospital only when she was "on her last breath". They planted pills of unknown properties and threatened to "charge" her with a drug offense. When Viktoria's father died, they did not tell her anything - they waited for her birthday to shout into the "feeder" of the cell: "Congratulations, your father has died! And after the stage in Rechytsa colony, Kulsha was first of all sent straight from the quarantine to the SHIZO.

"Vika is a flint," former political prisoners who sat with Kulsha in the pre-trial detention center or in the colony told me. She endlessly kept hunger strikes - the only way of resistance available to a prisoner - and refused not only food, but also water. For months she did not leave the punishment cell. Polina Sharendo-Panasiuk, who saw Victoria in February, said Kulsha looked like a living dead person - thin, haggard, she could barely walk. Polina, who went through the same torture, since her release has been constantly saying that Viktoria is being killed behind bars.

I tried to understand why the executioners are so fixated on Viktoria. With Polina everything is clear - she is a longtime enemy of the regime. Just like Statkevich, Seviarynets, Afnagel, Avtukhovich. These people can't be changed, so the only way out is to give them longer terms, so that they don't stir up the people on the outside. But Viktoria Kulsha is not one of them.

And then I realized: the point is that Viktoria is not one of them, not one of the veterans of resistance and "enemies of the people". She lived a quiet, prosperous and peaceful life. She worked as a safety engineer, had diplomas from the district administration. She was not involved in anything, even on the contrary: in 2010 she was a member of a precinct election commission. That is, she was absolutely "their" person, loyal to the max. And suddenly in 2020, this trustworthy Kulsha begins to administer the protest chat. And this is gratitude for all that the state has done for her? "We gave you, traitor, and a diploma, and gratitude from the administration - everything. We would have given you a watch or a tea set along with a greeting card for your anniversary, but you refuse to give it to us, and for what? We'll rot!"

The enemies got their huge sentences. Thousands of those who were at the protests by chance, in an emotional impulse, served their time and got out. And those like Viktoria Kulsha are also being tortured for ingratitude. For not appreciating the favor and diplomas of the district administration. For the fact that they dared to leave, and not to go to the new bureaucratic emigrant structures, but simply to the street, for the sake of their own conscience. For their hope for a different future, not the one promised by the authors of the letters and their masters. For rage and rebellion.

Viktoria Kulsha will survive and get out, no matter how many times she is imprisoned on new charges. And other political prisoners will get out. The power of their curses would surely be enough to blow the hell out of this already slipping world. But they have other goals. Not to blow up, but to build. Not to destroy, but to create. Not to avenge, but to live. Executioners, however, do not understand this.

Irina Khalip, especially for Charter97.org.