A Former Political Prisoner Agreed To Become A KGB “agent” And Left For Poland

Vadim Pashkovsky spoke about recruitment.

Former political prisoner Vadim Pashkovsky agreed to cooperate with the KGB in order to leave Belarus for Poland, where, according to the security forces’ plan, he was supposed to carry out “assignments.” The man told “Gomelskaya Viasna” about this.

After his release in December 2025, Vadim found a job in his field at a private subsidiary of the international Kronospan Group in Mogilev. However, he did not get along with the company’s director, so he decided to resign. When management asked him to come in to pick up his signed resignation letter, two men in plain clothes were waiting for him in the office where Vadim went.

“These people didn’t show me any documents; they just said we needed to go somewhere to talk. They put me in a car and took me to the KGB headquarters for the Mogilev region. That’s when I realized who these people were. I asked them what had happened and what I had done wrong, but they didn’t answer. Once in the KGB office, they asked me what I had been imprisoned for, whether I had received any assistance from human rights organizations, and whether I had received food parcels. Then they took me to another building, where I underwent a polygraph test. There, they asked me whether I had ties to foreign intelligence services, whether I was involved in “extremist” activities, and so on. After the polygraph, they took me to the rented apartment where I lived in Mogilev. There, they conducted a search. But this happened without any witnesses and without any legal authorization: they just walked in on their own and ransacked the place. “They took my laptop and phone,” Vadim said.

After that, they brought him back to the KGB and told him that they had found “many files on the laptop that raised suspicions of industrial espionage.”

“And so they said, ‘It’s either 15 years in prison, or you’ll have to help the country.’ I said I didn’t want to go to prison. And they told me, ‘Then go home now; we’ll be in touch with you.’ That was on July 30. So I went home to Zhlobin. And on August 3, they told me to go back to Mogilev and wait for a meeting,” the former prisoner said.

At the next meeting, KGB officers told the man that he had to go to Poland and “just live there, socialize with people, and periodically tell them how he’s doing and who he’s spending time with.” They also sent him links to human rights organizations that Vadim was supposed to write to.

“I wrote to BYSOL because they told me I needed to get a payment from BYSOL. I wrote to BYSOL; this dragged on until around August 20. But I told them that I didn’t have any contacts in Poland and didn’t know where to get a bank account. In the end, BYSOL didn’t transfer anything to me. They went quiet for a while. I had already thought it was all over. But one day they wrote to me again and said, ‘Now you need to write to “Viasna” and ask how you can leave the country.’ When I wrote to “Viasna,” they advised me to submit an application for a Polish humanitarian visa to the Polish consulate in Minsk. And the KGB agents wrote to me, telling me how to draft that letter. They told me to write that I had simply been fired because I was on the “extremists” list. And they told me not to tell anyone that the KGB had taken me away from work,” Vadim said.

He submitted his application to the Polish consulate on September 2 and received his visa shortly thereafter.

“After getting the visa, I bought tickets to Warsaw. <�…> I crossed into Poland on the night of October 3. And I immediately planned to go to the Polish agency that handles security. Because even when I was still in Belarus, I knew I wouldn’t be doing that kind of work. But at the same time, I knew that if they realized I was plotting something against them, I wouldn’t be able to leave the country. <�…> But I was really, really scared—I didn’t know then, and I still don’t know now, what the consequences might be. In the end, I decided to make a public statement and tell the whole truth in order to “nullify” all these KGB assignments and plans. I decided to turn to “Viasna” for this, because I had been in contact with this organization from the very beginning. “I want to publicly state what happened to me and refuse any cooperation with the Belarusian KGB,” Vadim said.

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