“Ten guys in black tracksuits, with walkie-talkie earbuds, surrounded us,” Shevchenko recounted. “Then two of them grabbed me and clamped their hands over my mouth. People around us turned away, pretending not to see anything—they are that afraid of the KGB there. The men dragged us over to a gray van, with no windows, and shoved us inside, with an officer sitting on each side of us so we couldn’t move. There were a total of six cars with our minivan, and we peeled out at high speed.”

The activists demanded to know who these men were, but they refused to respond. One of them grabbed Shevchenko’s mobile phone and started scrolling through her messages. “The men asked us who we were and why we were here. We told them the truth, since they knew anyway. ‘With us you need to be careful,’ one of our captors kept saying,” Shevchenko told me. She asked in vain to be turned over to the police. “They kept telling us, ‘Now, bitches, you’ll find out what it means to come to Belarus and destroy our national unity!’ They pulled my hands behind my back and put plastic handcuffs on me. They made us sit in the van with our heads bent down between our knees. Every time I raised my head, they hit me. Everything swelled in me from the cramped position. I never had to go to the bathroom, but Oksana did, so they took her outside and she squatted down and went, like a dog on a leash. We drove for about five hours, always hunched over.

“It was unbearable,” she remembered. “They kept telling us, ‘Remember your mothers’ faces and how happy they were when they saw you. And now imagine them when they see your dead bodies.’ Otherwise there was total silence. It was eerie. They didn’t talk to each other, not a word. They were professionally trained.”

Finally, late in the afternoon, the vehicle stopped. “I thought, Now they’re going to kill us,” Shevchenko said. “They made us get out. They all had masks on. One guy was waving around a huge knife. They took us into the woods and made us strip topless, and gave us a swastika poster to hold. Now they will kill us for sure, I thought.”

The men took pictures of the women with the Nazi emblem and then threatened to kill them. “Then one said, ‘Take off your pants and panties, and turn around and face away from us. And bend over.’ Now they’ll rape us, I thought. We waited three minutes like that, but they didn’t rape us,” she told me.

“‘Dress by the count of three!’ he then shouted. ‘Strip by the count of three, or you will be killed!’ We kept dressing and undressing. They beat us if we couldn’t keep up. Then they came over to us with some sort of bucket and poured something over our faces. It was green paint, some sort of oil, and then they dropped feathers all over us. One guy grabbed me and shoved me to the ground. He held me down and waved his big knife over me. He grabbed my hair and yanked, and cut it off with the knife.”