About BELARUS BRIEF

Evidence for decisions on Belarus.

Evidence for decisions on Belarus

Belarus Brief is an independent analytical newsletter for policy staff, diplomats, researchers and journalists who work on Belarus.

We look at what is changing, what the available evidence supports, and what would change our assessment. We cover repression and prisoner releases, state institutions, the economy, and relations with Russia and the West. We also cover the information environment, where some decisions are explained at length and others are never reported.

What you get

Each brief starts with a concrete question. Do prisoner releases interrupt the machinery that produces new cases? What happens when an official statistic changes after the news cycle has ended? Does a shift in media coverage show a change in policy, or only a campaign? Or is it a gap in our collection?

We bring together evidence that is usually read separately: public registers, official statistics and statements, independent reporting, and research by others. Charts make the comparisons visible. Source notes say where the evidence comes from and where it stops.

Some briefs establish a new finding. Others test an influential reading of events or return to an earlier assessment. Some end with a question the data cannot settle, and say so.

Daily briefs, one weekly digest

A new brief appears each day. It examines one development, document or claim. Every Sunday subscribers receive Weekly Signals, a digest with a short summary of each finding and a link to the full text. You can follow the briefs as they appear or catch up in one email.

Our approach

Narrative intelligence is part of the method. We track how institutions frame events, how messages travel, and where accounts differ. We pair this with institutional records and with what officials and agencies actually do.

The research draws on a multilingual archive of Belarusian and international sources: state and independent media, Telegram and YouTube. Software and language models help us search the archive, extract data, classify documents, and prepare drafts and digest summaries. An editor selects every topic, checks the figures against the sources and is responsible for the published text. A conclusion is only as strong as the evidence and the checks described in the brief.

Coverage is uneven. A document count measures recorded coverage. By itself it does not measure public opinion or political influence, and it does not show how often an event happens. When something is absent from our archive, that is a finding about the sources we checked. We make a broader claim only after further checks.

How to read the findings

We separate documented facts from interpretation and forecast. We say where the evidence stops and what would change our conclusions.

Watch items list developments to follow. When we make a prediction, we aim to give it a deadline and a clear test. Follow-up briefs report the result, whether it supports our reading or not. When a brief needs correction, we add a note at the top of the original text.

Authors whose work we review are welcome to respond, and we publish substantive replies.

How we use AI
Belarus Brief is built with AI tools at several stages. We work mainly with Claude models made by Anthropic. They help us search and count our document collection, prepare first drafts and charts, and check the English.

A human editor then reads every brief, checks each number against a named source and decides what is published. The short notes in the weekly reading brief are also drafted with AI and checked by the editor before sending.

The editor holds responsibility for everything on this site, including mistakes, and corrections are made inside the article with a note on what changed. Some AI systems now place invisible marks in the text they produce, so our pages may carry such marks. That is expected, and it matches what this page describes.

Who is responsible

Belarus Brief is produced by a research team working in Lithuania. The editor is responsible for every published brief.

Use Belarus Brief to check a claim before it goes into a briefing, and to ask a more precise question at the next meeting.