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Femen activists stage anti-Lukashenka protest in front of Belarusian embassy in Ukraine

Activists of Ukraine’s feminist group Femen staged an anti-Lukashenka protest in front of the Belarusian embassy in Kyiv on December 28.

A dozen women assembled outside the building with their hands doused with brilliant green. They chanted several times “Long Live Belarus.”

Femen will conduct next year a campaign of solidarity with pro-democratic activists in Belarus and Russia to help them topple their “dictators,” said one of the protesters.

The Femen activists, who usually stage topless protests, showed up in front of the embassy fully clothed.

Three Femen members were abducted and terrorized after a topless protest in front of the KGB headquarters in Minsk on December 19.

Their phones went dead several hours after their anti-Lukashenka protest. The women’s whereabouts were not known until the next afternoon, when they phoned an associate to say that they had been abducted, beaten, abused and dumped in a forest near the Ukrainian border, with their phones and passports taken away. After spending a few hours in the forest, they finally arrived at a village located kilometers away from the Ukrainian border, where they asked a man to give them his phone to make the call.

They were interviewed by police, and the Ukrainian consul arrived at the scene. The women returned to Ukraine in the early hours of December 21.

They said at a news conference in Kyiv that they were abducted at the Uskhodni bus station in Minsk on the evening of December 19 by six men, who introduced themselves as police officers and bundled the activists into two vehicles. After riding around the city for hours, the men blindfolded the women and handed them over to a group of other men, who the women said introduced themselves as activists of Russia`s ultra-nationalist Russian National Unity ("RNE"). The women were taken to the woods, beaten, forced to undress and hold Nazi banners, and doused with brilliant green. Everything was videotaped, said the Femen activists. //BelaPAN