The Belarus Network

The Belarus Networks was a collaboration between French, Belarussian, Russian and Lithuanian journalists (Polish, German and Austrian journalists helped). We used public records as well as shoe-and-leather reporting to find the connections between the men and women of power in Minsk, their moneymen abroad from Syria to Sudan to London, Vienna and Zürich. We used advanced computer science and the techniques of datajournalism to automatically transliterate names from Russian and Belarussian to all European languages to automatically query the registries of commerce and property of several EU countries. We showed that the usual clichés on Belarus, be they about a "tough but fair" regime or about autarky, did not stand a careful analysis. Instead, we showed that money flowed from the President's office to a wide array of moneymen, in a system different from Russia's as the core (Lukashenko and his family) did not let anyone rise to challenge them in over 20 years.

The database that we created is kept up-to-date and will provide a wealth of information to journalists in the run-up to the presidential election of 2015. The cross-border collaboration helped push a widely ignored topic to national and international media, such as France24 and the Lithuanian public radio.