A court in St. Gallen, Switzerland, on Monday convicted a former Belarusian security officer over the 1999 abduction of businessman Anatoly Krasovsky, one of the most prominent opponents of President Alexander Lukashenko to vanish in a series of disappearances that Belarus itself never solved and never prosecuted. Yuri Harauski, who served in the SOBR special police unit and has admitted taking part in the abductions of three of Lukashenko's opponents who were later killed, received a two-year suspended sentence — two years on probation — which the court said was reduced because of his cooperation and his comprehensive confession. The same court acquitted him over the abduction of former Interior Minister Yuri Zakharenko. Rights groups say the ruling is the first conviction anywhere in the world of a member of Belarus' security forces.
The verdict turned on Harauski's own words. The court said his confessions were credible, and that in the Krasovsky case his intent and his knowledge of the violent abduction and the killing that followed were clear. In the Zakharenko case, it said, that intent could not be established, and on that charge he was cleared. He could not be tried for murder: because the alleged crimes were committed in Belarus, Swiss prosecutors charged him instead with enforced disappearance. It is the first case in which Swiss courts, applying the principle of universal jurisdiction, have tried charges of enforced disappearance or alleged crimes committed in Belarus. The verdict can still be appealed once more, to the Swiss Federal Supreme Court.
Harauski's path to a Swiss courtroom began with a confession on camera. In 2019, he told a German broadcaster that in 1999, as a member of SOBR — an elite interior ministry unit commanded by Dmitry Pavlichenko — he had been part of a government-run squad that abducted and killed Lukashenko's opponents. He said Pavlichenko shot the abducted men, that Zakharenko's body was cremated, and that the other two were buried at an interior ministry training ground. He gave the interview in exchange for political asylum in Switzerland, and human rights activists then set his prosecution in motion. At his first trial in September 2023 he was fully acquitted: the judge concluded that he might have been involved, but that his role had not been legally proven, after he had made contradictory statements over time. The daughters of Zakharenko and Krasovsky appealed that acquittal, and it was their appeal that produced Monday's conviction.
The disappearances themselves remain one of the darkest open chapters of Lukashenko's rule. Zakharenko, a former interior minister who had broken with the president, vanished in Minsk in 1999. On September 16, 1999, Viktar Gonchar — the former head of the central election commission — and his friend Krasovsky, a prominent businessman and public figure, walked out of a bathhouse and got into their car; the car never left the parking lot, and broken glass and traces of blood were found at the scene. None of the three men was ever seen again, and no bodies were ever recovered. A cameraman, Dmitry Zavadsky, disappeared the following year in a case also blamed by Lukashenko's critics on the same squad.
Inside Belarus, the case was closed off from above, according to the record investigators left behind. Belarusian investigators admitted the men had vanished but said they did not know what had happened to them, and they never established that a murder had taken place. In 2000, investigators arrested Pavlichenko in connection with the abductions — and Lukashenko ordered his release, firing the head of the KGB and the prosecutor general as the investigation was put on hold. A Council of Europe rapporteur, Christos Pourgourides, concluded after visiting Belarus that "steps were taken at the highest level of the state to actively cover up the true background of the disappearances," and that the evidence suggested senior state officials may themselves have been involved. No one has ever been prosecuted in Belarus.
At the appeal hearing on September 22, Harauski repeated the claim at the centre of his confession: that Lukashenko himself and Viktor Sheiman, a former head of the Security Council, had ordered the abductions. He was reluctant to give further details about the disappearances, refused to answer questions from the victims' lawyer, and declined to make a closing statement. He apologized to the relatives and friends of the victims, said he hoped to receive a "fair punishment," and argued that a harsh sentence could discourage others from coming forward with confessions about crimes committed by the Belarusian authorities.
For the families who forced the case back into court, Monday's ruling was a landmark even in defeat on half of it. "Even if it's a partial victory, it's the first conviction anywhere in the world of a member of the Belarusian security forces," said Philip Grant, founder of Trial International, the rights group that supported the daughters of Krasovsky and Zakharenko. Severin Walz, the lawyer for the two daughters, said: "An accountability gap has been closed. My clients feel very relieved." There was no comment on Monday from Harauski's lawyer. Lukashenko's government has rejected criticism of its human rights record from the United Nations and rights groups and denies holding political prisoners — and for 27 years it has left the question of what happened to Zakharenko, Gonchar and Krasovsky officially unanswered. On Monday, a court 1,500 miles from Minsk answered part of it.
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