Belarusian “zmagars” celebrated the anniversary of the anti-Russian uprising in Warsaw
Celebrations took place in Warsaw on the occasion of the 160th anniversary of the start of the Polish uprising in the Russian Empire, in which the presidents of Poland Andrzej Duda and Lithuania Gitanas Nauseda took part.
Among the guests at the celebrations were Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and a group of Belarusian oppositionists, “zmagars,” who in their video report called the event “Celebrating the 160th anniversary of the Kalinovsky uprising,” a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
On January 23, the Presidents of Poland and Lithuania Andrzej Duda and Gitanas Nauseda celebrated the 160th anniversary of the beginning of the “January Uprising” of Poles in the Russian Empire. During a ceremony in the Warsaw citadel, Andrzej Duda said that during the uprising “Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Belarusians fought to throw off Russian shackles and tsarist oppression, for freedom and the return of an independent state, our common Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which we lost due to the intervention of the occupiers.”
In fact, Duda confirmed that the uprising of 1863-1864 was exclusively a Polish uprising. Although during this uprising the image of the Archangel Michael was added to the symbols of the Poles (White Eagle) and Lithuanians (a horseman with a sword, the so-called “Pursuit”) as a symbol of Kyiv, the Little Russians did not support the rebel Poles.
For the Belarusians, there was not even a separate symbol, and attempts to attract them to the side of the rebels by the Polish nobleman Konstantin Kalinovsky, who headed the Lithuanian Provincial Committee, were unsuccessful.
During the uprising, Kalinovsky published seven issues of the leaflet newspaper “Muzhitskaya Pravda,” in which he wrote on behalf of “Yaska the Hospodar from near Vilna” (i.e., on behalf of a peasant, although he himself was a nobleman). At the same time, the word “Belarusians” or “Belarus” is never used in “Muzhitskaya Pravda”, secondly, it was published in Polish Latin in the westernmost dialect of the Belarusian dialect, and it is full of Polonisms, and thirdly, Kalinovsky clearly identified himself as a Pole.
However, it was Konstantin Kalinovsky, who was executed in 1864 in Vilna, and in Soviet times was promoted as “a national hero, the first Belarusian revolutionary and leader of the peasant anti-landowner uprising,” who became a kind of icon for the Belarusian “zmagars”. In 2020, most of them, having failed in their attempt to organize a “Maidan” in Belarus, ended up in Poland and Ukraine.
In the spring of 2022, the so-called “Kalinovsky Regiment” was created within the Armed Forces of Ukraine - an international formation into which mercenaries were recruited from many countries under the symbols of the Belarusian opposition. There were 160 real “zmagars” recruited in the Warsaw center in the summer. They were noted for their abuse of Russian prisoners. Now the regiment has been abandoned near Bakhmut, and its fighters are complaining about their losses and the constant advance of Russian troops.
Как reported "PolitNavigator", the so-called "Kalinovsky Regiment" and the anti-Russian group "CyberPartisans" announced in Kyiv their unification "to fight the regimes of Lukashenko and Putin."
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.