Exiled Belarusian Opposition Holds Elections Amid Large-Scale Cyber Attacks.

Mynsk; May 2026: A massive wave of cyberattacks and criminal threats has disrupted the first week of online elections for the Coordination Council, the representative body for Belarus’s exiled opposition.

Since voting have opened on May 11th 2026, the voting platform has been virally hacked by sophisticated denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks peaking at 12 billion false requests in just a few hours.

According to Pavel Liber, the developer of the online voting system, the sophisticated attacks involve extensive botnets that emulate mobile traffic from various geographic regions and target specific components of the system.

Meanwhile, the Election Commission Chairwoman Alena Prykhodzka told media reporters on the first day of voting. “These attacks are very difficult to repel, and they also cost money; expenses are incurred on both sides. The Belarusian regime has already spent hundreds of thousands of euros on its side”.

While, under pressure from the attacks, the organisers have moved the elections to another platform and extended voting by two days.

Established at the height of the controversial rigged 2020 elections; protests in Belarus had erupted to negotiate a power transition, the Coordination Council held its first elections in 2024, rebranding as a representative body that would be an alternative to the Belarusian Parliament.

This is the second time the Coordination Council has held elections via an online platform. The 80 seats in the opposition’s proto-parliament are being contested by 170 candidates in nine election lists. Ahead of the elections, about 100 newly running candidates to the council were designated by the Belarusian authorities as ‘extremists’ and their homes in Belarus were searched.

There have also been more threatening cases of intimidation: One candidate, Hanna Fedaronak, had a funeral wreath delivered to her, while an anonymous user launched a fundraiser for her funeral’.

Representing the democratic aspirations of the Belarusian people, the Coordination Council holds formal recognition from the European Parliament and maintains ‘special guest’ consultative status within the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. However, the body faces internal friction; critics argue it lacks sufficient public outreach and remains too dependent on the office of exiled democratic opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. Adding to these challenges is the high-profile disappearance of former speaker Anzhalika Melnikava, who vanished amid allegations of embezzling funds meant for the Belarusian exile community.

Meanwhile, the Belarusian authorities introduced fines of up to $3,200 for ‘illegally representing Belarus on international platforms’ in April 2026, while the country has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to propagandise against the elections, which attracted only about 500 votes on their first day.

Election Commission Chairwoman Alena Prykhodzka’s Affirmations On May 13th  –

Voting in the elections for the new Coordination Council was supposed to begin on the morning of May 11. However, the start of the campaign was initially postponed until the evening of the same day due to additional checks by the passport data verification company Sumsub, and then did not start due to massive DDoS attacks. As a result, voting became possible in the afternoon of May 12. A little more than 500 people voted during the first day of the election, the voting page is periodically inaccessible due to DDoS attacks.

“The attacks are constant, the voting platform sometimes goes down, it may be inaccessible. I’m giving you a comment now, and the platform is again overloaded with requests. DDoS attacks on both the voting platform and the Three Elephants website are constant. They come in waves. Yesterday, there were more than 600 million requests to the voting platform. This is if you take a broad wave. At the beginning of the voting, we experienced an attack of 1.3 billion requests”.

“For comparison, during the first election campaign in May 2024, the platform for voting in the elections to the Coordination Council also experienced DDoS attacks, but according to the chairman of the election commission, the number of requests during all election days did not exceed 30 million. This time, the attacks are very complex, they have their own strategy. Different parts of the system are attacked, it happens point by point. Requests are sent to certain parts of the system, testing it for stability”.

“The platform may be inaccessible in certain geographical regions, and work in others at the same time. People from one country come in, people from another country don’t. Requests are very well disguised as real devices, so they pass basic security shields. This is very expensive for the regime. This is not a simple bot attack, but an expensive and high-quality one. Which occurs from mobile phones, from computers. To organise such an attack, you need a very large and large-scale bot farm. Our shields miss this, because the requests look like a regular login from a regular mobile phone”.

“Voting appears to be impossible in such a condition; however, it is still possible. The most reliable way is to try to ‘catch’ the window several times. If not on the first try, then on the 3rd-4th it should work.

I appeal to voters to understand the situation in which we work and in which the elections are taking place. And if you don’t manage to vote the first time, try again. I understand humanly that it’s annoying. It’s angry. But it’s not because we did it poorly. That the developer didn’t finish something. It’s because the platform is constantly under attack”.

“How much could such massive DDoS attacks cost? In the first hours of voting, the developer of the voting system, Pavel Lieber, stated that their organisers had already spent about 50 thousand euros. According to Alena Prykhodzka, now this figure can be safely multiplied several times”.

“These attacks are very difficult to repel, it also costs money, the costs come from both sides. The regime has already spent hundreds of thousands of euros on its part. It is difficult to estimate a more accurate figure. We do not know under what conditions the payment is made. We do not know from which bot farms the attack is being carried out. But if we take, let’s say, market prices, the scale and quality of these attacks, then it is within the hundreds of thousands of euros”.

“The elections for the Coordination Council will continue until the end of the week. The results are due to be announced on May 18”.

Team Maverick.