When Belarusians came out on August 9 to protest what they saw as a mass falsification of the presidential elections, Marat Mikhal knew that a violent police crackdown was imminent. It had happened before.
In December 2010, after President Alexander Lukashenko claimed 80 percent of the votes in the presidential election amid allegations of vote-rigging, protests erupted in the capital Minsk but were swiftly suppressed by police forces.
The events of that year affected Mikhal, who was then just 16 years old, and politicised him.
Ten years later, as a young adult, he came out in the streets of Minsk to protest Lukashenko's fifth re-election, despite the heavy police presence. He was arrested, severely beaten and held in detention for several days.
The violence, however, did not deter Mikhal and many others from continuing to protest against Lukashenko.
"My relatives urged me [not to join the protests again]. But if not me, then who would? So I went out to protest despite [the warnings]," Mikhal told Al Jazeera.
On August 16, he joined more than 200,000 people who gathered in central Minsk for what some say has been the largest opposition demonstration in the recent history of Belarus.
Meanwhile, workers at various state factories and institutions announced strikes in solidarity with protesters, while videos of members of the security forces announcing their resignations circulated on social media.
Lukashenko's defiance
Despite the growing opposition against his rule, Lukashenko has remained defiant.
He has rejected calls to hold new elections and has instead proposed to amend the constitution in order to redistribute executive power.
He has also reached out to Russia's President Vladimir Putin to request help, which has stirred fears of possible Russian military intervention, similar to the one in Ukraine in 2014.
But according to analysts, what happens next in Belarus will be determined not just by decisions made in Moscow, but also by the resilience of protesters like Mikhal and their ability to maintain mass mobilisation on the ground.
Although Lukashenko is seeking help from the Kremlin, he is not on the best of terms with the Russian leadership.
In recent years, the Belarusian president has shifted between anti-Russian and anti-Western rhetoric, trying to exploit Russian-EU tensions to secure oil and gas price discounts from Moscow.
In pursuing this strategy, Lukashenko is said to have incurred Putin's resentment.
A rejected union
Earlier this year, Moscow announced that Belarus would start paying for Russian oil and gas at global prices after the Belarusian president resisted Russian pressure to go forward with a union between the two countries.
In 1999, Lukashenko had signed an agreement with then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin for the creation of a political and economic union, where the two countries would have common political institutions, economic policies, and currency.
The agreement was never fully implemented, but close ties to Moscow ensured the flow of cheap Russian oil and gas, which propped up the country's economy and precluded the need for privatisation of state-owned enterprises and political opening.
In the 2010s, as the Russian economy was hit by the slump in oil prices and Western sanctions, the Kremlin found it difficult to sustain subsidies for Belarus and sought to change this arrangement.
In response, Lukashenko pursued closer relations with the West, which led to the European Union lifting most sanctions on Belarus.
From Moscow's perspective, a union with Belarus would have justified the continuation of subsidies, but Lukashenko saw this as a direct threat to his power.
Before the August 9 vote, the Belarusian president repeatedly accused Russia of supporting the opposition.
On July 29, the Belarusian authorities arrested dozens of Russian citizens, claiming they were mercenaries from Russia's best-known private military contractor, Wagner, who were preparing a plot to destabilise the country.
As it became clear that the crackdown was not effective in suppressing the protests, Lukashenko switched to anti-Western rhetoric.
He has since accused the opposition of planning to join NATO and the European Union, ban the Russian language, and establish an Orthodox church independent of the Moscow Patriarchate - policies that Ukrainian nationalists have pursued since 2014, angering Russia.
Since the elections, he has also had at least two phone calls with Putin to discuss Russian assistance in case of a "foreign threat".
On August 18, he spoke for a third time with the Russian president, who informed him of his conversations with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron regarding the situation in Belarus.
The same day, Russian media reported that an aeroplane belonging to the Russian security service FSB and previously used by FSB director Alexander Bortnikov had landed in Minsk, but no details were provided on any formal meeting between Lukashenko and Russian officials.