When 15-year-old Mikalaj started school in Belarus this year, he discovered that the teachers and school administration no longer called him by that name. Instead, they called him Nikolai, which is the Russian equivalent.
Moreover, classes at his school, one of the best in the country, are now taught in Russian, not Belarusian, which he has spoken most of his life.
"It is obvious that our children are being deliberately deprived of their native language, history and Belarusian identity, but parents have been strongly advised not to ask questions about Russification," said Mikalai's father, Anatoliy, who spoke to The Associated Press fearing reprisals.
"We were informed about the synchronization of the curriculum with Russia this year and were shown a propaganda film about how Ukrainian special services are allegedly recruiting our teenagers and forcing them to carry out sabotage in Belarus," he said.
In recent years, dozens of teachers have been fired, and the Belarusian language sections of the website are disappearing. In Belarus, the mother tongue is disappearing because Russian is taking precedence, as official affairs are conducted in Russian, which dominates most of the media, and civil servants often do not use the Belarusian language.
It's not the first time. Russia under the tsars and during the Soviet Union imposed its language, symbols and cultural institutions on Belarus.
With the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Belarus began to create its own identity, and Belarusian briefly became the official language.
But all that changed in 1994, when Aleksandar Lukashenko came to power. That authoritarian leader made Russian the official language and abolished nationalist symbols. In 1994, about 40 percent of schools taught in the Belarusian language, and now there are less than nine percent.
Now that Lukashenko has controlled the country for more than three decades, he has allowed Russia to dominate all aspects of life in Belarus. Belarusian, which, like Russian, uses the Cyrillic alphabet, is almost no longer heard on the streets of Minsk and other large cities.
Belarus depends on Russian loans and cheap energy and has forged a political and military alliance with Moscow, allowing President Vladimir Putin to deploy troops and missiles on its soil.
Lukashenko mocks his mother tongue, saying that "nothing great can be expressed in Belarusian. There are only two great languages in the world: Russian and English."
Speaking to Russian state media reporters, Lukashenko once recounted how Putin once thanked him for making Russian the dominant language in Belarus.
"I said: 'Wait, what are you thanking me for? ... The Russian language is my language, we were part of an empire and we participate in (helping) develop that language,'" Lukashenko said.
Belarus was part of the Russian Empire for centuries and became one of the 15 Soviet republics after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The daily use of the Belarusian language decreased and continued only in the west and north of the country and in the villages.
This played a key role in the mass protests as disputed elections in 2020 gave the authoritarian leader a sixth term. In the fierce crackdown that followed, half a million people fled the country.
Like Ukrainians, Belarusians also had a desire for rapprochement with Europe, which followed their nationalist mood, said Belarusian analyst Valery Karbalevich.
"But the Kremlin quickly realized the danger and started the process of creeping Russification in Belarus," he added.
This encouraged pro-Russian organizations, joint educational programs and cultural projects to "sprout like mushrooms after the rain with harsh repression against everything Belarusian," Karbalevich said.
Belarusian cultural figures were persecuted, and hundreds of its nationalist organizations were closed.
Censorship and bans affect not only contemporary Belarusian literature but also its classics. In 2023, the Prosecutor's Office declared the 19th-century poems of Vincent Dunin-Marcinkevich, who opposed the Russian Empire, to be extremist.
Four cities in Belarus now host "Russian Houses" to promote their culture and influence, offering seminars, film clubs, exhibitions and competitions.
"The goal is to plant Russian narratives so that as many Belarusians as possible consider Russian as their own," said analyst Alexander Friedman. "The Kremlin spares no expense and acts on a large scale, which could be particularly effective and dangerous in a situation where Belarus is in informational isolation, and there is almost no one left in the country to resist the Russian world."
"I understand that our Belarus is occupied... And who is the president? It's not Lukashenko. The president is Putin," said Svetlana Aleksievich, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 and lives in exile in Germany.
"The country has been humiliated and it will be very difficult for Belarusians to recover from this," she said.
Human rights advocate Aleš Bjaljatski, convicted in 2023, demanded that his trial be conducted in the Belarusian language. The court refused and sentenced him to 10 years in prison.
Even speaking the Belarusian language is considered a demonstration of opposition to Lukashenko.
"The Belarusian language is increasingly seen as a sign of political disloyalty and is abandoned in favor of the Russian language in public administration, education, culture and media, either by order or out of fear of discrimination," said Anais Marin, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Belarus. .
Almost the entire troupe of the Janko Kupala Theater, the oldest in the country, fled Belarus amid political clashes. Its former director Pavel Latuška, now an oppositionist abroad, said that the new management could not hire enough new actors and had to invite Russians, "but it turned out that no one knew the Belarusian language".
"Back in 2021, Putin published an article in which he denied the existence of an independent Ukraine, and even then we understood perfectly well that he was pursuing similar goals in Belarus," said Latuska.
"The main course should have been Ukraine," he added, with Russified Belarus "as dessert."
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