One night in September 2020, Hanna Kanavalava fled her native Belarus and crossed the border into Ukraine – on foot, in the dark, and with her two young grandchildren in tow.

“Then Ivan asked me, ‘Grandma, is Mom in prison?’ And then I told him the truth,” Hanna said.

Ivan, now nine, and his sister Anastasiya, seven, have been living in exile for almost four years, separated from their parents, who were imprisoned in Belarus for opposing strongman President Alexander Lukashenko.

They are just two of hundreds of children separated from their parents in Lukashenko’s crackdown on dissent, a campaign that has seen hundreds of critics of the regime jailed after protests in 2020 threatened his 25-year grip on power.

Ivan and Anastasiya’s mother, Antanina Kanavalava, worked for Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the opposition leader who claimed victory over Lukashenko in the presidential election that summer.

Human rights groups and independent observers say the vote was marred by widespread fraud and ballot box rigging. Official results showed Lukashenko, in power since 1994, winning 80 percent of the vote.

Riot police cracked down hard on the protesters, leading to a wave of arrests and increasingly severe repression.

Letters

Antanina was arrested in September 2020 and sentenced to five and a half years in prison, while the children’s father, Siarhei Yarashevich, received two sentences totaling six years and three months.

The banned human rights organization Viasna estimates that there are 1,400 political prisoners in Belarus.

Hanna Kanavalava, 60, took the children out of the country four days after their mother was arrested.

She took them briefly to Ukraine and then to Poland, which has now become a haven for hundreds of thousands of people fleeing.

Hanna feared that the Belarusian authorities would seize Ivan and Anastasiya if they stayed, and possibly use them to put pressure on their parents.

The children write letters to their parents, but correspondence with political prisoners, if allowed, is severely restricted and censored.

Anastasia read parts of one of them to an AFP reporter: “Hi mom, how are you? I’m fine. I came fourth in the chess tournament. A big, big, big hug.”

The children are allowed to video call their mothers for five minutes at most once a month, under the supervision of prison guards.

‘Take care of mom and dad’

Hanna worries that her grandchildren, especially the younger Anastasiya, are starting to forget their parents.

But Anastasiya – who says she wants to “become a doctor or a vet… to earn a lot of money” – said she wanted to help.

“I want to spend all this money to take care of mom and dad. And to buy them a ticket to Warsaw when they get out,” she said.

Her mother, Antanina, developed serious eye problems in prison.

She will be released next year, if the sentence is not increased.

Then Hanna said, “My mission will be to help her be reborn, to take care of herself… and to reconnect with her children.” She whispered it so the children couldn’t hear.

Nightmares

Experts fear the emotional and psychological damage the situation is causing to the children of those in custody.

Volha Vialichka, a psychologist from Belarus, told AFP she has met 60 children of political prisoners and sees a lot of “pain, despair and anger”.

Many resemble “premature adults,” she said.

“They are very sensitive to moments that remind them of their circumstances, when they say to themselves, ‘I am alone, without Mom and Dad.’”

Although Hanna and the children are safe from the repression in Poland, they still face instability.

They have no permanent place of residence due to lack of income and depend on support from the Belarusian and Ukrainian diaspora and the Polish government.

For Ivan, a recent move to a new apartment on the outskirts of Warsaw brought back the trauma of their flight from Belarus.

He has nightmares about “his parents being taken away by soldiers” and about a “wolf in the forest,” Hanna said.

She regularly takes the children to demonstrations organised by the Belarusian opposition in exile.

‘Be strong’

Since May 2023, Hanna has also been responsible for two other children: Marcel and Timur Zhuravlyov, brothers aged five and fifteen.

Their mother, Olga Zhuravlyova, another Belarusian political opponent who fled to Poland, died last April after falling into depression and taking a drug overdose.

“My mother died because there was no one for her,” Timur said.

Marcel, who was playing soccer in a Spiderman cap when AFP visited the group, cried a lot when he realized his mother was gone, his brother said. “Now he doesn’t talk about it anymore.”

Hanna said that Timur looked like a “scared cat” at first, but his confidence has grown.

Their experiences have forced the children to become “more solidary,” she said.

“You have to be a team and be strong,” she said, before adding: “No one will ever replace their mother.”