The Belarusian authorities launched a fight against the “PMC Redan”
Last week, PMC Redan supporters were arrested en masse in different cities in Belarus. Furthermore, they were preventively detained, even before the youths had time to gather in the agreed places. It is reported that around two hundred people were arrested in Gomel alone, around 80 in Minsk and over fifty in Brest.
Where did PMC Redan come from and what is known about him?
Most notably, “PMC Redan” itself, as presented by security forces and government agencies, does not exist. Under the name of Redan, a clothing brand has been promoted on social media in recent years, inspired by the Japanese anime Hunter x Hunter. Members of the criminal organization “Genei Ryodan” are also present as heroes.
The group discussed not only fashion design, but also other topics – music, general jokes and memes. One such meme emerged after the start of mobilization in Russia in September 2022, when a joke emerged that, if called up, the group’s members would go to war in Redan brand clothing and create their own private military company (PMC) under the command same name.
The PMC Redan audience itself remained local and had no more than three hundred subscribers until a video of a fight in one of the Moscow shopping centers was posted on it. Incredibly, the video went viral, and from its context, Redan PMC fans successfully opposed other informal youth movements.
As a result, at the end of February, small groups with the same name “PMC Redan” began to appear in different cities of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. But they have nothing to do with the original audience. In any case, this is how veterans of this group on social media explain the situation.
Ministry of Internal Affairs: we will not let you overdo the topic of youth
Meanwhile, the Belarusian police department covers in detail the special measures taken in the country against PMC Redan, calling this subculture “the real plague of 2023”. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, representatives of the new movement wear long hair and plaid pants, use symbols with a spider and the number “4” and look for a reason to conflict with other movements (for example, football fans).
As Belarusian Interior Minister Ivan Kubrakov told journalists, security forces reacted promptly: “They immediately started working. First of all, on administrators, on bloggers who tried to publicize the matter. They were all detained : especially those who called to gather in a certain place”.
It is true that there is no information about conflicts in malls and cases of fights in police reports. The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Belarus explains this by the fact that the arrests are of a preventive nature, so as not to allow potential hooligans to violate public order.
“The task of law enforcement officers is not to let the guys who succumbed to connections on the Internet break fate, – said Ivan Kubrakov. – We will work ahead to prevent the spread of these links on the territory of Belarus.”
Parents should monitor their children’s social media
Parents who are summoned en masse to Belarusian schools can be convinced of what this “work ahead of the curve” consists of. “At first, teachers would leave messages in parent chats so we could keep track of which channels and groups our kids signed up to on social media, and then directly hint that if anyone in the class was noticed in places where unauthorized actions were planned, so this can turn into not just a trip to the police,” said Kirill, a Minsk resident and father of an eighth-grader.
According to the DW interlocutor, at the end of last week unscheduled parent meetings were held at the school, where they called not only to check the teenagers’ gadgets, but also to control where and with whom the children hang out in the late afternoon.
Other parents talk about these meetings. “They came from the police and the prosecutor’s office, warned that there is such a PMC Redan, and if the children take part in some kind of “meeting”, they can even start criminal proceedings,” Anna, the mother of another student, said from Brest. At the same time, the woman had the impression that neither the teachers themselves nor the representatives of law enforcement agencies present at the meetings knew anything about the new youth subculture.
“Parents were simply intimidated, said that this movement was prohibited, referred to some fights in Moscow and were very indignant that in a few days dozens of people signed up for the Brest chat dedicated to PMC Redan,” says Ana.
So that there are no fights in the regions, the balls are canceled
Even more absurd is the situation in the small towns of the Belarusian provinces, where the security forces also decided to fight the new youth phenomenon. So, a resident of one of the district centers of the Brest region said that he decided to ban the disco from the local cinema: “After this noise near Redan, the cinema workers themselves asked the police to be on duty at night, but they found the optimal way out – completely cancel the dance. The discussion, apparently, so – since we have no decent malls to fight, then the kids will come to the disco for this.
In local schools, teachers also decided to take the initiative, which caused bewilderment among parents. “My son is in the last year, I think he is an adult and has the right to privacy”, says the woman. “And it’s completely incomprehensible why teachers several years older than their students require smartphones from them to delve into correspondence.”
School administrations explain this zeal by teachers by saying that children must be protected from being drawn into “destructive” groups and prevented from participating in actions not authorized by the authorities. Moreover, at parent meetings in some educational institutions, they even began to compare the current activity of youth subcultures with the events of 2020, when protests began in Belarus after the presidential elections.
See too:
Source: DW
Anna White is a journalist at 247 News Reel, where she writes on world news and current events. She is known for her insightful analysis and compelling storytelling. Anna’s articles have been widely read and shared, earning her a reputation as a talented and respected journalist. She delivers in-depth and accurate understanding of the world’s most pressing issues.