Disinfo: Western project on Kurapaty memorial site plans to ruin Belarusian statehood

Summary

The Kurapaty memorial site on the outskirts of Minsk has become a Western project to ruin Belarusian statehood. Regular prayers by the Belarusian Autocephalous Orthodox Church in Kurapaty are a proof of this. The prayers are conducted for political reasons, to blame the Belarusian authorities for their incapacity, to provoke revolutionary moods among the population and to, eventually, destabilise the country.

Disproof

Conspiracy theory consistent with the pro-Kremlin narrative that the Belarusian Autocephalous Orthodox Church is favoured by the West in order to organise a full-scale split from the Russian Orthodox Church and to disrupt Russia-Belarus ties. Kurapaty is an area on the outskirts of Minsk, where at least 30,000 people (according to some estimates, up to 250,000 people) were executed for political reasons by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD in the period between 1937 and 1941. In 1993 the site was included in the register of the Cultural Properties of Belarus as the first-category of cultural heritage. On 4 April 2019, the Belarusian authorities, without a prior notification of society began digging up wooden crosses at the Kurapaty memorial site. These actions provoked protests from the population in Kurapaty and disapproval from representatives of the Orthodox, Greek-Catholic and Catholic churches; not only the Belarusian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Many other religious organisations are also speaking out against them (including the Belarusian Exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church) because they consider Kurapaty an important memorial site.

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Sozh (Archived)
  • Reported in: Issue 144
  • DATE OF PUBLICATION: 07/04/2019
  • Outlet language(s) Russian
  • Countries and/or Regions discussed in the disinformation: Belarus
  • Keywords: Orthodox Church, Conspiracy theory
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