The Lukashenko regime in Minsk’s move against a university in Lithuania looks like part of an authoritarian playbook that Europe has already named, documented and still not fully learned how to answer.
Angelo Valerio Toma
Europe would be making a serious mistake if it treated Belarus’s move against the European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania, as just another episode in the regime’s domestic repression.
On 14 April, the Belarusian Supreme Court applied one of the regime’s most politically-toxic labels, “extremist organisation”, to a university in Vilnius, turning what might otherwise have looked like a familiar Belarus story into something larger.
Lithuania’s foreign minister, Kęstutis Budrys, was right to describe the decision as “outrageous” and as “yet another hostile act by [Alexander] Lukashenko’s regime against Lithuania and the EU”.
The European Parliament has already warned of an alarming level of transnational repression by the Lukashenko regime, including on EU territory, and has explicitly noted the intimidation of higher education institutions and academics in exile labelled extremist organisations.
The European External Action Service (EEAS) has now condemned the ruling against the university as a blatant and unjustified attack on academic freedom, freedom of expression and the right to education, linked it to a broader pattern of repression inside as well as outside Belarus, and reaffirmed support for the university, its students, faculty and alumni.
The question now is whether that recognition will be matched by something firmer than condemnation.
In Belarus, “extremism” is one of the regime’s main instruments of control.
As of 15 April 2026, Viasna counted 909 political prisoners still behind bars. In 2025, Belarusian courts designated 2,107 information materials as “extremist”, while the state’s list of “extremist groups” reached 324 entities, including educational initiatives, civil society organisations and independent media channels.
Tool of repression
The label is itself a tool of repression, used to turn affiliation into danger and fear into policy. According to a report circulated by the SOTA media platform on Telegram, the KGB may already be trying to use the EHU designation to gather information on students under the threat of criminal liability.
A January 2026 study prepared for the European Parliament treats transnational repression inside the EU as part of a wider form of foreign pressure that increasingly relies on digital surveillance, legal abuse and intimidation by proxy through relatives who remain at home.
Freedom House’s latest decade-long dataset records 1,219 physical incidents of transnational repression carried out by 48 governments in 103 countries between 2014 and 2024, which is a reminder that what often appears as a series of isolated outrages has become a recognisable method of rule.
A second European Parliament study published in 2025 argues that EU member states are still often ill-equipped to protect those targeted by this kind of pressure and that existing European initiatives do not yet provide adequate guidance or resources for defenders in exile.
Read in that context, the move against EHU stops looking like a strange Belarusian excess and starts to look like part of an authoritarian playbook that Europe has already named, documented and still not fully learned how to answer.
Brussels still tends to view Belarus through the usual framework of sanctions, democracy support and human rights, even though the EU has already acknowledged Belarus’s hybrid attacks against member states and expanded sanctions in response to actions affecting European security.
Minsk, however, is acting as though it can define what counts as legitimate Belarusian education even when it exists under EU protection, which in practice tests whether coercion can follow institutions into the EU without meeting serious resistance.
Pressure of this kind should be treated with the same seriousness, especially when it is applied inside the Union.
Brussels should make clear that criminalising ties to institutions, people or ideas inside the EU carries political consequences.
The move fits a broader pattern of cross-border repression and strengthens the case for better protection of exiled institutions and for the students, faculty, alumni and relatives made vulnerable by association.
Support for exiled Belarusian education should form part of Europe’s own resilience and security agenda.
The European Parliament has already moved in that direction, and the rest of the EU should follow.
The real test is whether the EU will defend its own political space once an authoritarian neighbour begins to extend repression into it.
By branding an institution in Vilnius “extremist”, Lukashenko has shown how easily repression can cross a national border and still be read in Europe as a domestic Belarusian abuse.
That kind of permeability is exactly what authoritarian regimes are quick to exploit.
