Russian academic given 400 hours of community service for comparing Lukashenko to Hitler

A Moscow court has found a Russian political scientist guilty of slander over comments he made comparing Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko to Adolf Hitler, and ordered him to complete 400 hours of community service as punishment, legal defence advocacy Slovo Zashchite reported on Thursday.

In January 2022, Andrey Suzdaltsev said on his Telegram channel that Lukashenko admired Hitler, “covers up his own terror” by talking about the Nazi genocide and was essentially, “no different from the fascists of the 1940s”. Noting that Suzdaltsev had received lenient treatment from the court, Slovo Zashchite said he could have been given a prison sentence of up to five years for insulting a foreign head of state.

Suzdaltsev lived and worked in Belarus between 1993 and 2006, during which time he repeatedly criticised Lukashenko’s authoritarian tendencies. He was eventually deported to Russia in 2006 after being deemed a threat to Belarus’s national security. In 2024, the Belarusian authorities declared Suzdaltsev’s Telegram channel “extremist”.

Formerly an assistant professor at the elite Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Suzdaltsev resigned his post in 2021 without making any public statement explaining his departure. At the request of the Belarusian authorities, Suzdaltsev’s page was removed from the university's website in March 2024, according to independent media outlet Agentstvo.