Belarusians Exposed Former Berkut Employees Who Fled to Minsk AMAP

The prosecutor's office of Ukraine promises to check the names.

Among the current Belarusian AMAP who are involved in dispersing peaceful protests in Minsk, Belarusian journalists were able to identify former employees of the Ukrainian special unit Berkut. It was Berkut members who took part in the violent dispersal of protesters on Maidan in the center of Kyiv in 2013-2014. After a new political team came to power, many of them fled from the investigation. Some were seen in the annexed Crimea, others in Russia, and now several people are among the employees of the Belarusian special forces, currenttime.tv reports.

On July 15, opposition supporters are detained in the center of Minsk. The presidential campaign in Belarus is already in full swing. In the video, during the detention of IT specialist Aliaksandr Kuushynau by AMAP, who was trying to ride a bicycle through the cordon of the security forces, Internet users identified the former Ukrainian Berkut officer Sergei Panasenko. Now he is in the uniform of the Belarusian AMAP.

In 2017, during the previous protest events in Belarus, Panasenko was also involved in a journalistic investigation. The InformNapalm international community then claimed that the Belarusian side had recruited former employees of the Ukrainian Berkut.

The Belarusian press service Radio Svaboda wrote about their participation in the events of 2020. Now new evidence has been published in the material of the Belarusian newspaper Novy Chas.

Here, too, the name of Panasenko appears; he is no longer a citizen of Ukraine, but, as journalists claim, a citizen of Belarus. After Panasenko was first identified in 2017 during the arrests of protesters, he changed his last name and first name on social networks and deleted all his photos. But he was still recognized in the summer of 2020, during the arrest of that same IT specialist on a bicycle.

The next person involved in the investigation is the ex-member of Berkut Sergei Gavrilyak. However, the journalists managed to obtain evidence of Gavrilyak's participation only in the events of 2017 as an employee of the Belarusian AMAP. He has not been seen at the current protests. On social networks, Gavrilyak is registered under a fictitious name and surname; he restricted access to his page.

Another person involved in the journalistic investigation is Anatoly Primak. He left Ukraine after the victory of Maidan. We managed to find a photo of him from a hand-to-hand combat competition among police officers held in Minsk in January 2017. Then the state publication SB. Belarus Today wrote about him as an employee of the Minsk AMAP. Primak also cleaned up his social networks, removing photos and any information about his previous and current jobs.

However, on March 6, 2020, the name of the former Ukrainian Berkut member was noticed in the case of the Central District Court of Minsk. Primak was summoned to court as a witness in the case of Belarusian public activist Mikalai Dziadok. However, Primak did not appear at the meeting, allegedly due to illness.

State newspaper SB. Belarus Today helped to identify another Ukrainian Berkut ex-member Dmitry Antsupov in its publication from 2018 about the next working meeting of the Minsk security forces. On October 26, 2020, in the Telegram channel, which reveals the identity of the security forces involved in the dispersal of peaceful rallies in Belarus, information appeared that the former Ukrainian Berkut member Dmitry Antsupov is an inspector of the special training department of the AMAP in Minsk.

Earlier, the Belarusian press service Radio Svaboda sent a request to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Belarus to clarify how many former Ukrainian employees of the special forces unit Berkut are now working in the country, but received no response.

Current Time also appealed to the department of the Ukrainian prosecutor's office, which is engaged in investigating crimes committed against the Ukrainian Maidan participants in 2013-2014, including by Berkut employees. They promised to check the names of Berkut ex-members noticed in the Belarusian protests and answer whether they are wanted and whether they appear in the investigation materials.