Article About Skaryna, Where Scientist Encrypts Anti-War Phrase, Deleted From MGIMO's Website

The phrase was encrypted by the principle of acrostic.

The article by Ilya Lemeshkin, associate professor of Charles University (Prague), in which he encoded the phrase "Die Putler. No to war. I. L." Attention was drawn to this by the SOTA edition.

In the morning the article, dedicated to the Belarusian first printer Frantsysk Skaryna, was available on the site.

The article was written by Ilya Lemeshkin in December 2022 and on February 24, on the anniversary of the beginning of a full-scale war in Ukraine, it was sent to the MGIMO management for further publication.

In the article dedicated to the Belarusian first printer and his books, Ilya Lemeshkin addressed the readers in Skaryna's language - in the cultural manner of the 16th century. At that time Frantsysk conveyed his textual expression in two ways: horizontally, as people do today, and vertically, with the help of an acrostic - a poem designed for visual perception, in which the initial letters of the lines, read from top to bottom, form a word in Old Belarusian.

The material consists of 22 paragraphs (a reference to the year 2022, the beginning of Russia's aggression against Ukraine), the acrostich consists of two initials at the end of the article and four lexemes, which together form two sentences: "Die Putler. No to war. I. L."

The associate professor himself said that he specifically insisted on a layout that made the acrostic noticeable. The editors of the magazine accepted all the author's requests without objection.