Ukrainian feminist group FEMEN's topless protesters made an unsuccessful attempt on Monday night to storm a building in capital Kiev where Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko was staying as part of a two-day official visit to the neighboring country.
The self-styled group, which describes its activists as "sextremists," said on its website on Tuesday that they staged the protest to remind Lukashenko of the "brutal harassment" of FEMEN activists by security forces in the Gomel forests in Belarus in 2011 following another topless demonstration near KGB headquarters in capital Minsk.
FEMEN said it also protested against the beating and repression of Belarusian heroes who called to fight Lukashenko's dictatorship. FEMEN reminds Lukashenko about escapes of journalists who were criticizing the regime, it added.
Police carried away the topless protesters who chanted anti-Lukashenko slogans. The activists, carrying burning torches, wrote on their bodies "Viva Belarus," and "Dictator, get out."
FEMEN said it was opposed to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's friendship with "garbage like Lukashenko that breaks the European course of development for Ukraine." FEMEN vowed to continue its fight to overthrow Lukashenko, "the last dictator of Europe, for free Belarus without dictatorship, prisons and deaths."
The group appealed to the world to wage a "psychological war with dictators, watch them night and day, and don't let them act."
Three FEMEN activists -- two French nationals and one German --were imprisoned for staging topless protests last month in front of a Tunis court building, demanding the release of a Tunisian FEMEN activist arrested earlier.
The group that catches worldwide attention for staging bare-chested protests in public places claims to champion "a new ideology of the women's sexual protest presented by extreme topless campaigns of direct action. FEMEN is sextremism serving to protect women's rights, democracy watchdogs attacking patriarchy, in all its forms: the dictatorship, the church, the sex industry," it says on its website.
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