«Belarus is turning education into a strategic instrument of state control over future elites, while the democratic movement risks losing the institutional capacity to educate, retain and reproduce its own».
Minsk is trying to build its own controlled cycle for reproducing human capital — from school through specialised education to state technology projects. At the same time, the authorities are increasing the cost of obtaining independent education outside this framework, most clearly demonstrated by the EHU case. Democratic emigration faces the opposite problem at the same moment: there are enough people and intellectual freedom, but the institutional and financial infrastructure remains weak. Milinkevich’s departure sharpens the question of who can turn educational initiatives in exile from a collection of grant-funded projects into a long-term political investment.
This week, education was at the centre of several politically significant developments at once. On 17 August, human-rights defenders reported that persecution in the “EHU case” had already affected at least 175 students, graduates and members of their families. On 18 August, the Ministry of Education announced that from the new school year eighth-grade pupils would study elements of artificial intelligence, while unmanned aerial vehicles would be added to the pre-conscription training programme. Finally, on 22 August, a farewell ceremony was held in Warsaw for Alyaksandr Milinkevich — the former joint candidate of the democratic forces, a scholar and one of the founders of the Free Belarusian University.
1. From School AI to the Academy: the State Builds a Personnel Pipeline
The changes to school curricula announced on 18 August look, by themselves, like ordinary modernisation of education. Artificial intelligence is being added to the eighth-grade computer-science course. At the same time, drones are being introduced into pre-conscription training.
However, combined with the creation of the Academy of Intelligent Technologies, these decisions reveal a more systematic design. The authorities are trying to identify and direct human capital earlier towards areas they consider strategic: AI, microelectronics, engineering technologies and defence-relevant competencies.
This does not necessarily indicate that a fully developed unified strategy already exists. However, such a configuration creates the preconditions for a controlled educational vertical: schools identify and orient talent, specialised classes and olympiads select it, the Academy concentrates the most promising students, and state organisations become the clients shaping their subsequent careers. Against this background, the combination of technological and military-applied components is characteristic. Neural networks and drones, a research elite and strengthened pre-conscription training coexist within the same education policy. The aim is to prepare human resources for the state’s particular understanding of technological and national security.
2. The HTP as an Example of the Limits of the “Golden Cage”
The authorities have already conducted a similar experiment — albeit in a different form — with the High-Tech Park. For decades, the HTP remained an exception within a heavily regulated economy. A special regime, tax benefits, a high degree of economic autonomy and the ability to operate on the global market made it possible to build one of the economy’s most successful sectors.
This experiment had not only an economic but also a social effect. A large group of young, well-paid and internationally mobile specialists emerged. As a result, one of the ideologues and founders of the HTP, Valery Tsapkala, tried to use this potential in politics by standing for president in 2020, though unsuccessfully: the Central Election Commission did not register his candidacy. Many representatives of the IT community took part in the 2020 protests or supported those affected by them. The political crisis was followed by repression, company relocation and mass emigration of specialists. In 2020–2021 alone, around 20,000 IT workers left Belarus. After 2022, the outflow and relocation of businesses accelerated further.
The HTP became an experiment in creating a privileged enclave within an authoritarian system. Its history revealed the limitation of such a model: the state is prepared to tolerate substantial economic autonomy only for as long as it does not generate independent social and political agency.
The Academy of Intelligent Technologies looks like an attempt to avoid a repeat of this problem. The state again wants highly educated, globally competitive specialists, but seeks to integrate them into the state system of orders, career trajectories and obligations much earlier.
3. The EHU Case: Alternative Education Becomes a Political Risk
This week, the other side of the state strategy became especially clear. According to Viasna, as of 17 August persecution connected with EHU had affected at least 175 people. Human-rights defenders report searches of students, graduates and their relatives, as well as pressure on families to secure students’ expulsion from the university.
If the creation of the Academy is intended to make remaining inside the state system more attractive for a talented young person, pressure on EHU raises the cost of making the opposite choice.
This substantially changes the meaning of the “fight against brain drain”. The state is trying to compete for human capital not only through the quality of its offer, but also by restricting alternatives.
A fundamental contradiction arises here. The more successful the new Academy is at training genuinely competitive specialists, the more mobile its graduates will become. They can therefore be retained either by the quality of the scientific and professional environment or by additional administrative restrictions. The experience of the HTP and the current pressure on EHU show that, when these two tasks come into conflict, the system tends to choose the coercive option.
4. Poland: from a Refuge for Students to an Educational Centre
After 2020, a significant share of lecturers, researchers, students and intellectuals found themselves outside the country, but no national educational institution of comparable durability emerged around them.
At the New Belarus conference on 8 August, education was already framed as a strategic issue. Pavel Seviarynets proposed creating a new elite Belarusian university in Poland to train personnel for the country’s future.
The foundation for this already exists. The Kastus Kalinoŭski Programme has been operating in Poland for twenty years. Since its creation, more than 2,900 people have been admitted to it, including almost 1,700 in 2020–2025. Programme participants studied at 83 Polish universities. A separate Programme II allows repressed graduates of Belarusian universities to continue academic work at Polish research institutions.
The scale of the student community speaks in Poland’s favour. In the 2024/2025 academic year, 12,200 Belarusian citizens studied at Polish universities — the second-largest group of foreign students after Ukrainians. By comparison, EHU had around 1,500 students from all countries in 2025/2026, about 70 per cent of them Belarusians. After the beginning of a new wave of repression, the current student body fell to roughly one thousand.
Repression sharply increases the risks for students from Belarus and further limits EHU’s ability to perform its original function — providing independent education to people who maintain ties with the country.
This does not mean that EHU should simply be closed and mechanically moved to Poland. The university has European accreditation and remains an important educational institution. But it is rational to associate the centre of future investment in independent Belarusian education with Poland, where there is already a much larger student population and an infrastructure for its integration.
In the future, functions could be divided. The Kalinoŭski Programme and Polish universities could assume a greater role in training in technical, engineering and applied fields, economics, finance, public administration and law.
An independent Belarusian university could focus on what is difficult to dissolve within universities in host countries: Belarusian studies, language and linguistics, the history of Belarus, sociology, political science, culture, and studies of national identity, society and the Belarusian legal system. With the necessary accreditation, it should run full master’s programmes, award degrees and, over time, build its own doctoral school.
This would create not a parallel system of general higher education, but an infrastructure for training personnel for the future Belarus: applied specialists would be educated at strong European universities, while the Belarusian university would ensure the reproduction of knowledge about the country itself.
5. After Milinkevich: Experts Exist, but the Political Institution Does Not
The death of Alyaksandr Milinkevich makes the shortage of an institution capable of reproducing the elite particularly visible. He was not only the 2006 presidential candidate and an internationally recognisable politician, but also a scholar who later participated in creating the Free Belarusian University. His European profile and political capital made it possible to speak about educational projects as both political and academic tasks.
Milinkevich knew how to translate an educational need into a political solution that could be understood by the government and universities of a partner country. After the 2006 presidential campaign, he publicly appealed to Poland to help repressed students. In the same year, together with Polish Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz and representatives of Poland’s rectors’ community, he signed a letter on the creation of the Kalinoŭski Programme. In 2020, Milinkevich and Jan Malicki, head of the University of Warsaw’s Centre for East European Studies, signed another letter — on the creation of the Free Belarusian University. He possessed what educational initiatives in exile particularly lack today: the ability to connect the academic community, democratic politics and international contacts.
Today, individual elements of such a team do exist. Pavel Tsieraškovič possesses the most obvious academic and organisational resource. He worked at Belarusian State University and EHU, chaired the EHU Senate, and since 2025 has served as Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s adviser on education and science. His profile corresponds to developing an educational model, programmes and institutional architecture. Tsieraškovič’s responsibilities already include developing roadmaps, interacting with educational initiatives and participating in grant and scholarship programmes. His natural niche is academic architecture and institutional design.
Alyaksandr Fiaduta has a different type of resource. He is a literary scholar, a habilitated doctor of the humanities, a political analyst and former political prisoner who, after his release, returned to active intellectual work in Poland. His strength lies in the combination of academic qualifications, political visibility and the ability to work in the public intellectual sphere. He is one of the possible creators of the university’s humanities core, academic council and public intellectual profile.
Tsieraškovič and Fiaduta complement one another: the former is stronger in designing an educational system, the latter in its public and political representation. But a combination of personalities does not solve the main problem — the absence of long-term institutional funding.
If Poland, Germany or European institutions decide that preserving the Belarusian university and research environment is a strategic investment in the future Belarus, academic, political and fundraising functions can then be distributed among different people and organisations.
Thus, the events of August have outlined two opposing strategies in the struggle for Belarusian human capital. Minsk is forming a vertical in which talent is identified ever earlier, directed into fields required by the state and expected to remain within a controlled career system. At the same time, the authorities are turning an independent educational alternative into a source of personal risk.
The democratic environment has the opposite advantage and a mirror-image weakness: it has freedom, lecturers and thousands of students, but still lacks a unified long-term infrastructure. Poland already possesses most of the necessary elements — the largest Belarusian student community, the Kalinoŭski Programme, a university network and part of the émigré academic community. The central question is whether these fragmented resources can be turned into a system capable of training personnel and reproducing Belarusian knowledge for decades.
This article is published with the permission of the BIT editorial team. It first appeared in BIT’s Person of the Week section, which looks at individuals whose actions and decisions have a significant impact on Belarus’s political, economic and security environment.
BIT is a weekly analytical bulletin that monitors key developments in and around Belarus. Its focus is not simply on what happened during the week, but on what those developments may mean, how they are connected, and what trends they may point to.
Each issue brings together the developments considered most relevant from a political, institutional, economic and security perspective, alongside political and economic commentary. BIT also pays attention to rumours, informal signals and less visible developments that may indicate emerging trends before they become part of the broader public discussion.
For access to BIT’s weekly analysis, subscription enquiries, or further information, please contact the editorial team at bitdigest@proton.me.