A photo on social media shows a brown-haired woman smiling in the sunshine next to a blooming flower bed and a wall with a distinctive graffiti tag. German police are now investigating allegations that her husband, a former Belarusian prison officer, subjected inmates to beatings and abuse.
Her husband is Dzmitri Shynvize, who spent some 20 years working at Babruysk prison, 100 kilometers southeast of Minsk, rising to a senior position. Former inmates at the prison have given RFE/RL’s Belarus Service detailed accounts of mistreatment by him, including being strangled with a scarf and being held naked in a cage.
The photograph of Shynvize’s wife was taken on Goethestrasse in Schwerin, a pretty lakeside town in northern Germany, and posted on Russian social media site VKontakte. It appeared in a report by exiled Belarusian news outlet Nasha Niva in mid-August, which stated that the couple had moved to Germany and changed their surname.
In September, German state prosecutors told RFE/RL that the police were investigating.
"The Schwerin public prosecutor's office received a corresponding statement of facts from a citizen…. The case is now being investigated," they said.
Now, an organization of former Belarusian security officials, Belpol, has said that it has handed over evidence of Shynvize’s “alleged involvement in the torture and ill-treatment of political prisoners” to German authorities that are investigating.
The Prison's 'Chief Overseer'
Former political prisoners told RFE/RL that Shynvize, 44, was effectively the “chief overseer” of inmates.
Vadzim Yermashuk, who served time in Babruysk from March 2022 to June 2024, said Shynvize was fired three or four months before his release.
“There were rumors he was dismissed for abuse of power, because there were so many complaints. Everyone hated him -- not only political prisoners but ordinary convicts too,” he said.
Yermashuk recalled Shynvize subjecting him to homophobic abuse and strangling him with a scarf.
“He smiled, handed one end of the scarf to another guard, held the other himself, and started choking me,” he said.
Yermashuk was then given 15 days solitary confinement. The experience, he said, pushed him close to suicide: “For two weeks I thought about jumping from a third-floor bathroom window.”
He added that other inmates told him Shynvize beat them with a truncheon and forced them into stress positions.
Another political prisoner, Aleh Kulesha, spent months at the prison in 2022. He recounted Shynvize making new arrivals kneel with their heads pressed to the ground and hands raised to display their handcuffs.
“We stayed like that for about ten minutes in the snow,” he said. Kulesha also said Shynvize ordered him to be held naked in a cage for hours as a punishment for speaking Belarussian. Shynvize, he said, “told me he was Russian by origin, Russian by passport.”
Shynvize, who is now reportedly going by the name Schoenwiese, could face prosecution in Germany for actions in Belarus.
Legal Challenges
In June, a German court gave a life sentence to a Syrian doctor, Alaa Mousa, who tortured prisoners under the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad. German courts have also tried crimes committed in Rwanda, Congo, and Gambia.
But there is a high bar for such cases.
"If Shynvize can be accused of torture as a crime against humanity, the German courts have full jurisdiction," Andoni Filpa, a Munich-based lawyer, told RFE/RL. But a prosecution could be suspended if Shynvize left the country, he added.
Shynvize’s current whereabouts are not clear, and it is also not clear if an arrest warrant has been issued. German authorities have neither confirmed nor denied Nasha Niva’s report that Shynvize had obtained German citizenship via his German roots.
Yermashuk said he would like to meet Shynvize “to look him in the eyes in a free country.”
Kulesha also said he would like to confront Shynvize.
“I really want to meet him and say: ‘So, in Germany do you speak Russian, or have you learned German?’ In Belarus he never managed to learn Belarusian,” he said.
