Anzhalika and the secret agent: The love story behind the disappearance of the Belarusian opposition’s speaker

In collaboration with the Polish weekly magazine Polityka, the Belarusian Investigative Center (BIC), BYPOL, and the Cyber Partisans.

Доступно на русском

On March 24, Belarusian opposition figure in exile Pavel Latushka, head of the National Anti-Crisis Management (NAU), received a strange text message.

It was sent by Anzhalika Melnikava, who in January had been elected speaker of the Coordination Council of Belarus — essentially the main representative body of the country’s exiled opposition, created by president-elect Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. Melnikava apologized for not attending an opposition march the previous day, and she refused to participate in a reception at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But the march had already taken place the day before, and Melnikava could not have been unaware of this. Latushka immediately tried to call her, but there was no answer.

Opposition activists were seriously alarmed. Melnikava's colleague went to her home and confirmed that no one was there. Latushka filed a missing person report with the Polish police. Was this a kidnapping? A betrayal? It was hard for her colleagues to believe that Melnikava had switched sides. No one had any doubts about her integrity, which is why she had sole access to the funds of the Białoruś Liberty foundation, which were used to finance the Coordination Council. She also had access to lists of individuals in Belarus still receiving assistance from European organizations, along with a great deal of other highly sensitive information. Melnikava personally knew many Polish politicians, including the president and the speaker of the Senate, and was a regular visitor to the Polish Sejm.

Opposition members held out hope until the very last moment that the situation was a misunderstanding, but with each passing day, it became increasingly evident that their worst fears were being realized. The Insider managed to establish the full chronology of Melnikava’s disappearance.

Melnikava's rise to success

Melnikava was born in Nyasvizh and lived in Minsk, where she held a senior management position at the Belarusian branch of Coca-Cola. She was not politically active and instead focused on family life, raising her daughters with her IT specialist husband. However, during the 2020 protests, as she later stated in multiple interviews, she suddenly realized that “the authorities are deceiving the people.” She joined the demonstrations, carried protest signs, moderated the “Free Nyasvizh” chat, and actively participated in other protest-related Telegram groups.

After receiving two fines for a solo picket in 2021, Melnikava left Belarus — first for Ukraine and later for Poland. There, she sought to obtain citizenship through the Karta Polaka (Polish Card) program, pointing to her Polish ancestry through her grandmother. The Melnikava family settled in the city of Białystok in the country’s northeast under the Polish Business Harbor initiative, which allows freelancers, startups, and businesses to quickly and easily move to the country without extensive checks.

In Białystok, Melnikava quickly became close friends with Marina Leszczewska, founder of the Belarus 2020 foundation and a practicing psychologist. Melnikava initially turned to Leszczewska for psychological help, explaining that she was going through a divorce. Then, after becoming friends, she helped Leszczewska draft a grant application for a psychological assistance project aimed at helping refugees from Ukraine and Belarus, and it was quickly approved. Former employees of the foundation said the project was exceptionally well-written. Anzhalika was described as talented and hard-working, and her efforts quickly paid off. She initially explained her interest in working with the opposition as a way to earn a living in a new country while distracting herself from the divorce.

Opposition activists who knew Anzhalika say she did not share the typical ideological zeal or fervor associated with the movement. If she expressed progressive views at all, they say, it was through her attitude toward sex — often speaking with friends about attending private sex parties in various countries.

In 2022, Anzhalika sent her children to live with her mother in Nyasvizh and moved to Warsaw. At the same time, she offered to buy the Belarus 2020 foundation from Leszczewska, but Marina and her associates refused to sell it.

From Warsaw, Anzhalika sent a message to her former Telegram chat group in Nyasvizh:

“It's awesome abroad. I'm sitting on a pile of money, sucking up grants, not working (well, except as a prostitute, for fun, like all emigrants, and I moonlight for the KGB too [like the] two-faced creature I am). It’s all peace and quiet in Europe. Civilized. I don't miss my family — I've moved on.”

In Warsaw, Anzhalika, along with a group of anonymous Belarusian hacktivists known as the Cyber Partisans, launched the Białoruś Liberty Fund, which immediately began collecting donations to support the activities of the Cyber Partisans and later, the Coordination Council. Pavel Latushka invited her to join the NAU — he was sure that Anzhalika could be trusted thanks to her previous work with the hacktivists.

With her move to Warsaw, Melnikava's standard of living rose sharply. She settled in a new residential complex in the Bialany District and traded in her troublesome BMW for a nearly new Mercedes. Colleagues described her as a woman who was never short of cash — generous with loans to coworkers, stylish in her appearance, and unafraid to spend on herself. She even established her own €10,000 prize for the best opposition initiative.

“She told me that her husband was a cool programmer and that he gave her money. She said she received child support of around $5,000 a month. I was surprised by her trips to Dubai because it's unsafe, expensive, and why would you want to go there? Go to Spain for a swim if you really want to,” recalls Białoruś Liberty co-founder Dzmitry Shchyhelski.

At the end of 2024, Melnikava received Polish citizenship by decision of the Masovian Voivodeship. Before that, the voivode, as required by procedure, had to request a threat assessment from Poland’s Internal Security (ABW) department and the police. Clearly, neither body saw a threat.

A love affair

Melnikava's husband, Andrei, never severed his ties with Belarus, traveling there to visit relatives and for work — and he was openly skeptical of the opposition. His father worked until recently as an employee of a state-owned petrochemical company with a network of gas stations. As soon as Anzhalika started working at NAU, she was reminded that her husband's trips were unsafe — and that they made her vulnerable, since he could be pressured by KGB officers into making her work for them (cases like these had already occurred).

Anzhalika then announced that she had divorced her husband, and they did indeed begin living in an open marriage. He was seen at triathlon competitions in the company of a woman from Belarus, and she was spotted in short-lived relationships with other men — including opposition figures and politicians from other countries. According to her colleagues, Melnikava came across as a vibrant woman who attracted the attention of everyone around her. However, in 2024, Anzhalika and her husband unexpectedly moved back in together — to a newly built apartment complex in the Bemowo district of Warsaw. She explained to her coworkers that she and her husband slept in separate rooms, raised their children together, and that he helped her out financially. This seemed plausible, as neighbors often saw Anzhalika's husband cleaning his shoes in the hallway or returning from his runs. But this was not the whole truth.

Melnikava's Polish friend said that in 2023, Anzhalika began to take better care of herself, had her lips enlarged, got tattoos, and joined a gym to lose weight. One of her tattoos depicts a rōnin — a Japanese samurai who lost his master.

“I got it done a year ago,” she said in an interview with the opposition outlet Belsat in July 2024. “The warrior on my arm is me as I really am: with a katana and always ready for battle. And on my back is another rōnin, holding down a weak girl. That's me as I would like to be. I want someone stronger than me to hold me down and protect me.”

In January 2024, after a trip to Sri Lanka, she looked happy and told a friend about her engagement to a man ”living in Belarus who cannot travel to the EU, so they meet in exotic countries.” Her Instagram photo shows that she really did have a new ring.

“She showed me his photo and her engagement ring. She said he was from Belarus, that he was an athlete, and that she was in love with him,” Anzhalika’s friend told The Insider.

One of Melnikova's Instagram photos clearly showed that she had a new ring.

Melnikava did not share this news with her colleagues in the opposition. She also told her friends that her husband had forbidden her from taking her children to meetings with her fiancé, as he did not want them to interact.

At the end of 2024, when her friends asked Melnikava how her engagement was going, she just waved it off. Acquaintances say that since January 2025 she had been very upset about something and had suffered nervous breakdowns. She gained weight, cried, and said she had problems — but almost no one at work seemed to notice. On Feb. 12, Melnikava celebrated her birthday with her colleagues, but the evening was marred by an incident that caused Anzhalika to have another nervous breakdown. One of her colleagues accidentally took Melnikava’s phone with her when she left. While Anzhalika was in a state of extreme stress, someone went to retrieve her iPhone and returned it to her, but her colleagues saw that she deleted all of its contents to factory settings before calming down.

A well-planned disappearance

Melnikava shared her plans to fly to the UK in February with everyone she could. Some of her acquaintances were even surprised that she had told them, as they had never discussed these kinds of topics before. On Feb. 26, Melnikava flew to London with her daughters. Shortly afterwards, her neighbors saw her belongings packed up in the hallway: her husband had taken everything, even the microwave and a floor lamp. A few days later, on March 3, he left Poland for Belarus, describing his departure to a friend from his triathlon club: “I won't be able to come back from Belarus for a couple of months, until the situation in the news changes.”

Anzhalika only spent two days in London. On Feb. 25, the day before her departure from Warsaw to the UK, Melnikava booked a room at the five-star Araliya Beach Resort & Spa in Unawatuna, Sri Lanka. Anzhalika was familiar with the hotel, having stayed there before.

She and her children stayed at Araliya Beach from Feb. 28 to March 7. According to the Cyberartizans, on March 5, two days before her departure from Sri Lanka, a large sum of money was transferred from the fund to Melnikava's account — part of a grant received for the work of the Coordination Council. Another large transfer was made on March 18, and some smaller amounts were paid out almost until the moment Latushka’s report was filed with the police. In total, about $150,000 disappeared from the account.

On March 7, 2025, Melnikava and her daughters left Sri Lanka and flew to Dubai on a Fly Dubai flight (this was her third visit to the UAE since the beginning of last year; she also flew via Dubai in January and July 2024). Since then, her trail has been lost.

A lover from the secret service

The Insider managed to identify Anzhalika Melnikava's lover as 32-year-old Alexei Vitalievich Lobeev, an employee of the Belarusian state security services who used a passport with the name “Aliaksei Hardzeyeu” (or “Alexei Gordeev” in the Russian transliteration).

They began dating no later than 2023, flying to Cuba together between Aug. 26 and Sept. 5 of that year. It is curious that Lobeev had planned to fly to Cuba with Anzhalika from Moscow, but she apparently did not dare to fly via Russia and traveled to the island from Europe instead. According to the passenger manifest, Anzhalika did not use these tickets, but her mother, Oksana Savchenko, flew on the same flights from Moscow to Cuba and back.

According to border crossing records, Lobeev flew to Sri Lanka from Jan. 16 to 21, 2024, and Anzhalika was there on the same days. It was there that Lobeev proposed to her and gave the ring.

Lobeev was born into a Belarusian military family in 1993 and graduated from the military faculty of Belarusian State University. In recent years, Lobeev has kept a low profile, avoiding social media and appearing only once at an event involving Belarusian military personnel — at a military hospital in Grodno in 2019. Ruslan Kosygin, the head of Belarus's military intelligence agency (GRU) at the time, was also in the same photo.

In his old account on the popular Russian social network VK, he indicated that he had graduated from Novosibirsk State Technical University, but it is unknown whether he actually continued his studies there (for some reason, he has no friends from Novosibirsk on this account).

Another important detail: since 2017, Lobeev has been happily married to Maryna Lobeeva (née Mikhnovets), also a graduate of Belarusian State University.

Both of Lobeev’s friends in the wedding photo, Artur Grigoryan and Anatoly Zhelnov, are military officers from the same university department. One of them is depicted in a photograph in which the then-head of the General Staff, Oleg Belokonev (Aleh Belakoneu), is seen handing a TT pistol to a priest.

The BSU military faculty trains personnel for the GRU and the KGB. Both agencies can issue cover documents, so establishing their affiliation with certainty is difficult. As in Russia, a “middle-of-the-road” option is also possible: military counterintelligence. What can be said with greater certainty is that Anzhalika’s engagement will not end in marriage.