MAYDAY from the airwaves: Belarus begins a death penalty purge of radio amateurs

Behind the absurdity of charging Baofeng users with 'High Treason' lies a terrifying intellectual genocide and an urgent call for international solidarity

In 1956, the legendary French film If All the Guys in the World gave our community its most beautiful tribute. It portrayed a global chain of strangers who reached across borders through their transmitters to save lives. That film defined us as "men of goodwill," people selflessly bonded by technology regardless of age, gender, or nationality. Today, that global chain of hands is being shackled in cold iron. In my home country of Belarus, the dream of global solidarity has been turned into a midnight nightmare by the state security apparatus.

I am writing this as Siarhei Besarab, EU1AEY. I am a licensed operator with twenty years in this hobby, and my heart is breaking for what is being lost. We are witnessing the systematic and intentional destruction of an entire technical community. This is a targeted intellectual ethnocide against the most skilled and curious minds in the country. Following the purge of Wikipedia editors and independent researchers, the regime has launched the "Radio Amateurs Case." This chilling title deliberately echoes the infamous "Doctors' Plot" of the Stalin era, where an entire group of the country's best specialists was designated as enemies of the state.

The purge began with disturbing propaganda features on state television where long-time, licensed operators were paraded like war criminals. В humiliating television segments, we watched our colleagues – Andrey Repetiy (EW1ABT) and Nikita Krasko (EW1AEH) – being forced to publicly repent for the "crime" of technical curiosity and international communication. They were coerced on screen to renounce their own technical expertise as something harmful. Vyacheslav Benko (EW1ACE) remains behind bars alongside them.

Propagandists presented the Belarusian Federation of Radioamateurs and Radiosportsmen (BFRR) as nothing more than a front for a "massive spy network" designed to "pump state secrets from the air." While these individuals were singled out for public shaming, we do not know the true scale of this operation. Propagandists claim that over fifty people have already been detained and more than five hundred units of radio equipment have been seized.

The charges they face are staggering. These men have been indicted for High Treason and Espionage. Under the Belarusian Criminal Code, these charges carry sentences of life imprisonment or even the death penalty. As a fellow operator, the sheer absurdity of these claims makes my blood run cold. The state displays mountains of confiscated Baofeng handhelds and SDR dongles as evidence of high-level espionage. Any ham operator knows that hardware like this is physically incapable of cracking the modern AES-256 digital encryption utilized by government security forces.

But logic does not exist in a state ruled by technical savages. To them, the fact that you can solder an antenna, track a weather satellite, or understand the physics of wave propagation makes you an existential threat. If this crackdown had reached me when I was still active in the country, my own call sign would have certainly placed me in front of a firing squad.

The most terrifying aspect for operators worldwide is how our most sacred tradition has been weaponized as an indictment. Our QSL confirmation cards and logbooks are being treated as criminal evidence of foreign contact. The state is literally transforming a history of peaceful technical exchange into a record of treason. Every card received through an official bureau and every recorded contact with an operator in Europe or the United States is being presented as "clandestine reporting to NATO agents." In the eyes of the Belarusian KGB, your friendly radio contact with an operator in Minsk is now their documented proof of espionage.

This is not a matter of frequency regulation. It is the intentional erasure of a intellectual society. By criminalizing amateur radio, the state is decapitating its own technical potential and destroying an emergency lifeline that historically coordinates rescue operations when all other forms of communication fail.

I ask you to amplify this signal. Please show this story to a journalist you know, relay it to human rights organizations, and bring it to the attention of your national radio amateur associations

When you sit at your stations and find nothing but dead silence on the frequencies where Belarusian operators once answered, remember that it is not an atmospheric disturbance. It is the result of a deliberate technical purge.

Martin Niemöller's famous warning has returned for a grim new century. When they came for the Wikipedia editors, I didn't speak out because I wasn't one. When they came for the journalists, I didn't protest because I wasn't one. Now they have come for the operators of amateur radio, and there might be no one left to transmit the warning. Listen, all the guys of the world — the chain of goodwill is being broken link by link…

73 QRT SK

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