Leadership Quote by Svetlana Tikhanovskaya

A sentence like this is built to travel: short, moral, and strategically unfinished. Tikhanovskaya’s “I call on” isn’t casual rhetoric; it’s the language of emergency legitimacy. As a politician who emerged from Belarus’s 2020 election crisis and the ensuing crackdown, she’s speaking from a position that is both powerful and precarious: a democratic challenger with mass symbolic support, but without the state apparatus that normally turns pleas into policy. The line compensates for that asymmetry by widening the stage.

“International community” is the real payload. It’s deliberately vague, a diplomatic umbrella that can mean the EU, the US, the UN, human rights NGOs, diaspora networks, tech platforms, sanctions committees, and media attention all at once. Vagueness is useful here: it invites buy-in without forcing any one actor to commit to a specific, risky action. It also quietly shames bystanders. If there is an “international community,” then neutrality starts to look like abdication.

“Stand with the people of Belarus” performs another careful move: it avoids claiming to speak for the nation as a government-in-waiting, while still asserting a moral majority against Lukashenko’s regime. It positions the struggle as people-versus-power, not East-versus-West, insulating the movement from the propaganda charge that it’s a foreign project.

The intent is coalition-building under repression: translate domestic protest into external pressure, keep Belarus in the global news cycle, and convert empathy into material leverage - sanctions, asylum, investigations, funding, and diplomatic isolation. The subtext is blunt: if the world looks away, the crackdown becomes sustainable.