‘We can only help ourselves’: women in Belarus take protests into their own hands

After police beat up demonstrators, flower-bearing women take to streets demanding change

The first chain of women appeared on Wednesday: a few hundred brave souls, dressed in white and holding aloft flowers, in a quietly powerful response to the gruesome violence inflicted on thousands of Belarusians over the previous days.

By the next afternoon, columns of flower-waving women were everywhere, parading along the broad avenues of central Minsk smiling, laughing and resolutely demanding political change.

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