Who is Dzmitry Shautsou -- scandalous head of Red Cross in Belarus
Dzmitry Shautsou in the occupied territory of Ukraine / ATN
"Now I have to meet the high expectations," laughs the woman during the phone conversation.
"You can do it only with the right amount of cognac".
This is a fragment of a conversation between the current head of the Belarusian Red Cross, former deputy Dzmitry Shautsou and his former colleague in the House of Representatives, and now the head of the Minsk Leather Association, Volha Palityka, in the spring of 2021. Before that, Lukashenka visited the association, and the director complained to Shautsou about the rapidly changing program, but boasted that she had "fought off" the idea of privatization. The director encouraged her: he promised not only cognac, but also to play badminton.
In 2012, Shautsou entered the House of Representatives. In the socia security fund data from that year obtained by Cyberpartisans, he received money from the presidential administration. But it is not known whether it was only his deputy salary or Shautsou was paid for some other services.
Diplomatic passport, BRC, "treatment of gays"
Already as a deputy, Shautsou, a holder of a diplomatic passport, traveled several times to Lithuania and Poland, and flew a few times to Austria. The trips usually lasted several days.
In 2015, he was entrusted with the post of head of the election commission of the city of Minsk. Shautsou's complicity in massive fraud in the 2020 elections led to his inclusion in the national "blacklists" of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, but not at the level of the EU or the United States.
Shautsou, "famous" far beyond the borders of Belarus for his trip to the occupied territory of Ukraine with Z-symbols, does not hide the fact that he speaks from pro-Russian positions. On the air of state channels, he often broadcasts the theses of Russian propaganda and justifies the regimes in Minsk and Moscow.
This does not seem to be a coincidence: even during his time as a deputy, before Russophilia became mainstream among Belarusian propagandists, Shautsou headed the country's branch of the International Public Foundation for the Unity of Orthodox Peoples.
At the same time, the statute of the Red Cross stipulates the requirement of impartiality and independence of all participants and national associations.
