Forcing Children into Mental Slavery

Isolating Anthie and Alexandra from the Outside World

Dear Readers,

Another year has passed without even the most basic contact with my abducted daughters. Those familiar with my case are aware that my more than three-year legal battle in the Republic of Belarus has resulted in a profoundly unjust verdict. The Belarusian courts have granted full rights and benefits to the abductor, Ms. Liudmila Trafimovich, while entirely stripping me, the left-behind father, of fundamental parental rights.

This blatant double standard has been acknowledged by numerous legal experts both in Belarus and internationally. And yet, as long as Alexander Lukashenko and his regime remain in power, systemic injustice will continue to thrive.

In December 2020, holding onto a final hope for reconciliation before the new year, my attorney, Ms. Martha Poni, and I made one last attempt to reach an amicable resolution with Ms. Trafimovich. We presented three carefully considered proposals, all guided by the best interests of our daughters and offering her substantial benefits, including financial support.

Our efforts were met with silence. Instead of engaging in dialogue, Ms. Trafimovich responded with hostility, hurling baseless accusations and fabricating illogical claims that defied reason. Her reaction confirmed what has become painfully obvious: she has no intention of allowing any form of communication between me and our children, not even a single phone call. She has also consistently ignored my repeated and reasonable requests that the children be allowed to study Greek and Swedish, the only languages through which they and I could meaningfully connect.

For years, I have offered to pay for private language lessons in full. Each time, the offer was either rejected or ignored outright. Her motives are clear: by preventing our daughters from learning Greek or Swedish, and given my inability to speak Russian, she ensures that communication between us is impossible. This outcome appears not incidental but intentional. It serves a broader objective of permanent alienation, aided and abetted by a complicit and indifferent Belarusian judiciary.

Children speak the truth, and that, above all, is what Ms. Trafimovich fears. By severing all lines of communication, she seeks not just to control access, but to control narrative. She wants to dictate what our daughters can say, can think, and can believe. It is a form of authoritarian control eerily reflective of the wider Belarusian reality: a society built on surveillance, repression, and silence, a tragic echo of KGB-style authoritarianism.

And it starts with the children!

Ms. Trafimovich cannot provide any rational explanation for why I am denied contact with my children unless every word is filtered and every interaction monitored. Instead, she resorts to vague platitudes about “parental caution” and “concern”, a bitter irony coming from the very person responsible for their emotional trauma. Rather than take responsibility, she distorts reality, casting me, their devoted father, as the threat. The audacity of this inversion is staggering.

She conveniently forgets traumatic incidents from our few permitted meetings in Minsk, at Hotel Yubileiny, Hotel Belarus, or Il Patio, where her anger and aggression deeply distressed our daughters. Alexandra once burst into tears after being shouted at merely for wanting to get a banana with me. Another time, Anthie screamed in panic as she was forcibly removed from my arms by Ms. Trafimovich and an associate. Meanwhile, Alexandra used harsh language in Russian, a language she could not have learned from me, as I do not speak Russian, but which I recognized from having been on the receiving end of it from Ms. Trafimovich during our years in Sweden.

And yet, despite this documented pattern of behavior, she has the gall to accuse me, absurdly, of using profanity and giving alcohol to our daughters. These fabrications are grotesque. But they serve a purpose: to project guilt, deflect attention, and paint herself as the innocent, beleaguered parent. It is a tactic as old as it is transparent: attack is the best form of defense.

Ms. Trafimovich appears bewildered that I refuse to give up, as if she expected to abduct our daughters with impunity and face no resistance. But I have every right, enshrined in international law and the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, to fight for my children. No authoritarian court system can extinguish that right. No ruling can erase my role as a father, no matter how systematically fathers, both foreign and Belarusian, are silenced by the system.

To Ms. Trafimovich, our daughters are not children with rights and needs; they are possessions. Or perhaps, in her view, they now belong to the State. And my only remaining function is to finance their captivity.

Indeed, under Belarusian court rulings, I have been reduced to the role of a donor: stripped of rights, stripped of dignity, and yet expected to provide financially for the very individual who illegally severed my relationship with my daughters. Let me be clear: only Swedish courts have jurisdiction over matters such as alimony. I again urge Ms. Trafimovich to bring these matters to Sweden, where legitimate due process exists.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that, for certain individuals in Belarus, and alarmingly, for elements within the state apparatus, child abduction is being used as a business model. This is a sophisticated form of transnational exploitation masked as a legal process. But let us speak plainly: this is nothing short of “Children for Cash.”

This corrupt machinery rewards abductors and fuels a legal-industrial complex in which lawyers, judges, and intermediaries profit from the suffering of children and the anguish of left-behind parents. Foreigners like myself are lured into the illusion of justice, only to discover that the outcome was predetermined, that meaningful contact with our children was never on the table. I am not alone in this. Other foreign parents have shared the same devastating truths.

Still, life has a way of revealing what has been hidden. No matter how long the darkness lasts, the light eventually returns.

Adding to this tragedy is the fact that my daughters are still being forced to attend a monastery-based institution under the authority of Andrei Lemeshonok, a man widely known for his extremist views and unwavering support for the “Russian World” ideology and the Lukashenko regime. It is heartbreaking to know that they are being indoctrinated in such an environment.

Meanwhile, the children of Belarusian judges and lawyers, such as Ms. Zdhanovich, Ms. Bagnich, and Judge Birulia, are studying abroad, comfortably shielded from the very system they impose on others.

In a bitter twist of fate, both of my daughters were accepted into prestigious schools in Stockholm, schools with years-long waiting lists. I submitted their applications at birth, dreaming they would one day study there. That dream was within reach. Anthie was admitted to the International School of Stockholm two years ago. Alexandra was recently accepted into the French School of Stockholm.

These were not just schools. They were gateways to freedom, to opportunity, to the future they deserve. Instead, my daughters remain confined in an isolated and doctrinaire world, crafted by a mother who, out of fear and a need for control, destroyed their chance at something better.

Ms. Trafimovich has deliberately cut them off from the outside world, not out of maternal care, but out of a pathological obsession with dominance. She cloaks her actions in religious and nationalist rhetoric, but they are rooted in authoritarianism. Ironically, she has become the very thing she once claimed to oppose while living in Sweden.

And she has done so at the expense of our daughters’ freedom, their development, and their very identities.

Nicolaos A.A. Cheropoulos
Father of Anthie and Alexandra
Stockholm, January 2021
Reviewed Oct. 2023