Hello fellas! It’s been a very long time since I last posted here, but maybe it’s time to give this blog a new life. Please, let me know what you think.

For some reason, I feel nostalgic for the times when I wrote most of my blog entries in English. Now that I am actively working as an editor of a Belarusian online newspaper westki.info I feel sad I cannot devote enough time to writing texts in languages other than Belarusian or rarely Russian. As a journalist and as a citizen of Belarus I feel obliged to persevere as hard as I can to bring about the change in my home country. That is what I need to focus on. Heh, I repeat this mantra to myself :-) But I also see how little is being written about Belarus in English.

There was a guy whom I never met in real life. We met online, and he motivated me to blog about Belarus in English. His name is Uladzimer Katkouski. Online he used a nickname Rydel23 or Br23. He passed away on May 25 last year after being one year in comma. Uladzimer died at the age of 30. In 2005, he survived a terrible car crash in Prague where he worked as a web-editor of the Belarusian Service of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. He never made it out of that comma.

Br23 was one of the best known bloggers in Belarus and one of few who regularly posted in English. When he was in comma, I posted in English quite a lot on my Belarus-American blog. After I graduated and came back to Europe I refocused on the local issues and switched back to Belarusian. But from what I’ seeing, there are even fewer bloggers who raise Belarusian topics in English. Now that we have launched this new English-language project, vilniusblogs.com, I promise to contribute some Belarus-related topics to it.

How is it relevant to the mission of this blog? Just as I wrote in my previous blog post I reckon Belarus and Lithuania to be the closest states ever. And what I would like to achieve by raising Belarus-related topics on this blog is to start a friendly and intelligent discussion between Lithuanians and Belarusians about our history, present and future. Anyone interested is very welcome to join us here!

Originally, I posted this on Vilniusblogs.com, but I am thinking more and more of resurrecting this blog as a good platform for raising Belarus-related issues.