Alexander Milinkevich

Alexander Milinkevich was a Belarusian physicist, civic organiser and opposition politician who became the face of the country's united democratic challenge to Alexander Lukashenko in the 2006 presidential election, and later a Sakharov Prize laureate, exile educator and adviser to a new generation of Belarusian democrats. He was born on 25 July 1947 in Grodno (Hrodna), then part of the Byelorussian SSR. After graduating from the University of Grodno he completed a Ph.D. at the Institute of Physics of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, specialising in areas that later university materials summarise as quantum electronics. He taught as a docent in Hrodna (1978-1980 and again from 1984), and between 1980 and 1984 helped build the physics faculty at the University of Setif in Algeria. Colleagues and obituaries consistently describe him first as a scientist and teacher who entered politics from local culture and city administration rather than from a party machine.

In Hrodna he moved from academic life into municipal work, serving on city committees and rising to deputy mayor between 1990 and 1996, the early post-Soviet years when local self-government still seemed a possible path for reform. After leaving city hall he founded civic initiatives (including the "Town Hall" organisation cited in RFE/RL's obituary) that opposed the consolidation of authoritarian power under Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994. In 2001 Milinkevich managed the presidential campaign of Siamion (Syamyon) Domash, an opposition contender. Domash later stepped aside in the opposition's incomplete attempt to field a single challenger that year. The unfinished business of unity returned in October 2005, when roughly 900 delegates of democratic parties and civil-society groups met in Minsk and chose Milinkevich over rivals including Stanislav Shushkevich and Anatoly Lebedko as the joint candidate of the United Democratic Forces for 2006.

His campaign deliberately echoed the language of Europe's colour revolutions. He told the Associated Press that Belarus could be "next after Ukraine," comparing his effort to Viktor Yushchenko's Orange Revolution, even while acknowledging the rural strength of Lukashenko's social-welfare state. Western governments and EU institutions received him: meetings in early 2006 included French foreign-ministry contacts, Polish prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, Lithuanian president Valdas Adamkus, European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, German chancellor Angela Merkel and EU foreign-policy chief Javier Solana. Inside Belarus he had almost no television access until a single pre-election slot. Official results gave him about 6 percent against about 83 percent for Lukashenko; international observers and Western governments treated the vote as neither free nor fair, and the UN Human Rights Committee later found that confiscation of his campaign leaflets violated his rights. Post-election street protests were broken up; in April 2006 he served a 15-day jail sentence for an unsanctioned rally. Through late 2006 and early 2007 he was repeatedly detained, accused of forged passport papers, drug trafficking (a charge he rejected as fabricated), traffic offences (including a drunk-driving stop when he was found sober), and fined in absentia for leaving Belarus "illegally," which he called revenge by Lukashenko.

On 12 December 2006 the European Parliament awarded him the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. Accepting it in Strasbourg, he insisted the prize belonged to the Belarusians who had demonstrated that spring, to students expelled from universities, to workers dismissed from jobs, and to imprisoned colleagues such as Alyaksandr Kazulin. He spoke of non-violent resistance in the tradition of Andrei Sakharov and promised that Belarus would return to the European family. He donated the prize money toward democratic work. In 2007 he also received Poland's Casimir Pulaski Knight of Freedom Award; other honours included the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award and Poland's Decoration of Honor Meritorious for Polish Culture. After 2006 he founded and for about a decade led the civic movement For Freedom, arguing that elections alone could not remove the regime and that civil disobedience and street action were necessary while fear remained the regime's main instrument. He declined to run in 2010, saying the result was foregone, and was blocked from standing in the 2012 parliamentary elections.

The 2020 uprising reshaped Belarusian politics again. Milinkevich supported Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya's campaign and later joined her team as an external adviser (Tsikhanouskaya's office materials list him as adviser on European choice). After the brutal post-election crackdown he left Belarus around 2021 and lived in exile in Poland with his family. There he helped found the Free Belarusian University (Wolny Uniwersytet Bialoruski) in Warsaw and served as its chancellor, linking physics-trained intellectual credibility to an educational project for Belarusians abroad. Polish authorities later searched and sealed a country house of his in 2023 even though no formal criminal case against him was publicly confirmed. In November 2025 he underwent complex surgery to remove a carotid-artery thrombus; severe bleeding and intensive care followed, and he never fully recovered. He died in Warsaw on the morning of 11 August 2026 at age 79. A funeral Mass was held on 22 August 2026 at St. John's Archcathedral in Warsaw; he was buried at Powazki Military Cemetery. Poland's president posthumously conferred the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, presented to his widow Inna Kuley. Tsikhanouskaya called him a man of exceptional dignity, a kind soul and a brilliant mind whose advice she valued deeply. College of Europe Natolin and independent Belarusian media mourned a scientist-politician whose calm, non-populist style had become a reference point for the democratic movement.

This memorial is for Alexander Milinkevich (also Alaksandar / Alyaksandr / Aliaksandr Milinkievich / Milinkievic), the Belarusian physicist and 2006 united opposition presidential candidate, Sakharov Prize laureate, For Freedom leader, Free Belarusian University chancellor, and adviser to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. It is not for Andrei Sakharov (Soviet physicist; namesake of the prize). It is not for Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Pavel Latushka, Siamion Domash, Stanislav Shushkevich, Anatoly Lebedko, Alyaksandr Kazulin, or Zianon Pazniak.