Belarus opposition supporters seek probe into Anatol Kotau disappearance

Supporters of Anatol Kotau are pressing Washington, Warsaw, Brussels and the United Nations to investigate his disappearance, after reporting that suggests the Belarusian opposition figure may have been seized in a transnational operation that reached from Turkey into the Black Sea. The case has become a test of whether Russian and Belarusian pressure can still reach exiles after they leave home, and whether any Western government can force accountability when multiple jurisdictions are involved.

Kotau, 46, vanished in August 2025 after traveling from Poland to Turkey. He stopped responding to messages from his wife within hours of arriving, and a missing-person report was filed electronically with Turkish police on August 25, 2025. Turkish authorities initially said they had no record of his disappearance. That silence has now collided with a reconstruction of his final hours that points to Trabzon, a private yacht, and a route toward Russia-linked waters in the Black Sea.

Deutsche Welle, working with the Belarusian Investigative Center and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, said Kotau boarded a yacht in Trabzon at about 6 p.m. on August 21, 2025. The vessel carried two Russian men, a woman from Azerbaijan and four crew members. Reporters said their reconstruction drew on police documents, corporate records, surveillance footage, passenger manifests, border records, satellite imagery, social media posts and interviews. The yacht was reportedly headed toward waters off Abkhazia, and sources familiar with the incident told reporters that Kotau was taken from the vessel onto a patrol boat after a Russian coast guard vessel intercepted it.

The details matter because Kotau was not an obscure exile. He had served in the Belarusian presidential administration, the foreign ministry, the Belarusian embassy in Poland and the Belarusian Olympic Committee, where he became secretary-general in 2015. Multiple reports say he broke with Alexander Lukukshenko’s system in August 2020, during the mass protests over the disputed presidential election, after condemning police violence and leaving state service for Poland with his family. Reuters reported on June 19 that Kotau had also been sentenced in absentia to 12 years in Belarus on charges of extremist activity and conspiracy to seize power, accusations he denied.

The Belarusian Investigative Center has described the disappearance as possibly the result of a planned operation. Other reporting has raised the possibility that Kotau was lured by people he knew. Either way, the episode exposes the fragility of protection for exiled dissidents and the limits of Western leverage when a disappearance appears to cross from Belarusian political repression into Russian maritime reach.