"I woke up - I think I slept for an hour - to two SWAT officers bursting into the room with automatic rifles. I'm trying to understand what's going on, I'm trying to get up, they won't let me, they push me back on the bed. I'm alone in the room. I hear some noise in the house, some screaming. I hear someone crying behind the wall. And I can't tell if I'm still asleep or what's going on. It turns out that about 20-30 men from the SWAT team - it's hard to say how many because more came in and then left - burst into the house and broke down the door. They put everybody face down on the floor. I wasn't there. They threw some people off their beds. They broke down the door. They kept me in that room for a very long time, videotaping me, wanting me to give my name and occupation."
"These were conversations with the head of the district police department in Oktyabrsk. I had several conversations with him. It seems to me that they had this idea that if you were summoned to the leadership, to the head of the ROVD, with his games of 'good guy' who is supposedly on your side and just doesn't understand what happened and sympathises and tries to change your mind about something - that it would be effective. He has always made subtle threats. That is, he didn't explicitly say, 'We're going to fire your mother,' but he said, 'You do realize we're going to find out where your mother works? She could have problems.' He didn't say he was going to beat you up, but he asked, 'Are you afraid of blood?'"
"I was always aware that power was had been taken over. I remember in 2011, when I was banned from going to demonstrations - they were very massive then. In 2015, there was a decline. And in 2020, I had a feeling: here, now it has affected everyone, or rather many. And that is also important. And something can change. On August 9, I understood that it was going to be difficult, that it was going to be bad, that there was going to be some repression - resistance against those people who come to vote. I was an independent observer. There were several possibilities to become an independent observer of the elections: I was nominated by one of the civic organisations. I went to vote in the morning. By then they had already started to shut down the internet. It was clear that it was going to be bad. I was not allowed to observe my polling station. There were two other people sitting on the stairs who also wanted to observe. We divided up the work - whoever was counting the votes, a lot of people came up to us and said, 'We have a white ribbon, we voted for Tichanovskaya.'"
Stanislava Terentyeva (Belarusian: Stanislava Tserantseva), born 26 November 1993 in Myory, Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus, is a Belarusian civil activist, human rights defender, ethnographer and coordinator of refugee assistance projects. She is a victim of political repression in Belarus and she was forced to leave the country in 2021. In 2020 she graduated from Polotsk State University by distance learning, majoring in hospitality and tourism. She worked in a non-profit organization for HIV/AIDS prevention in Vitebsk. She actively participated in the electoral campaign and subsequent peaceful protests after the 2020 presidential elections in Belarus. She was an independent observer at the 9 August 2020 elections. She was repeatedly detained, sentenced to administrative arrest and fined by the Belarusian authorities. In October 2020, she was subjected to a violent search by the police in Vitebsk and state television ONT broadcast a defamatory report about her. In July 2021, following the arrest of her husband, accused of „terrorism“, she had to flee Belarus for fear of prosecution. She remained in Ukraine, then lived in Georgia, where she founded and coordinated an international volunteer project to help refugees from Belarus. She completed a one-year course at the Polish-American University in Poland. After the outbreak of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she launched a large-scale initiative to support Ukrainian refugees, creating an information portal and engaging volunteers from different countries. In 2024, she participated in a training program in the Czech Republic.
