3pm: Film screening (84 minutes)

Followed by a conversation between Andrei Sannikov and Paul Hansbury

All welcome: Registration not required but kindly email Paul.Hansbury@warwick.ac.uk if you intend to join us, so that we have an indication of numbers.

FROM THE PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS:

Diplomacy is Andrei Sannikov’s life. Having succeeded in demobilizing the world’s most dangerous nuclear weapons arsenal, this master diplomat is now armed with a tie and business cards fighting for the return of a vanished democracy.

Sannikov never stops being a diplomat. He is a diplomat when he talks about his life and his country while staying in exile in Warsaw. Sannikov weighs every word knowing that people in Belarus could be tortured or killed for it. And yet he never loses that kind of hope or his fine sense of humour.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, everything seems possible. Sannikov is entrusted with a very special task: As a diplomat, he is significantly involved in the nuclear disarmament of Belarus. At first, due to the circumstances, he doesn’t even know how many nuclear warheads are stationed in the country. After the horrors of the Cold War, the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union raises international hopes that a world without nuclear weapons may one day be possible.

Sannikov’s story is a deep insight into the history as well as into the present of Belarus. After Lukashenko took office as president in 1994, he quickly crushed hopes for democracy.

In protest, Sannikov resigned from his post as deputy foreign minister in 1996. After that, he kept on fighting for a Belarusian democracy without even having official status. Sannikov never stopped being a diplomat – not in the Belarusian opposition movement when he had to mourn the political murders of his fellow campaigners, not when he ran for president against Lukashenko in 2010. Neither in KGB prison nor after his release. Even when the regime drove him into exile, Sannikov never lost sight of his goal.

Today, Sannikov is a diplomat in exile for a democratic Belarus that has yet to rediscover itself. Therefore, he remains on the diplomatic stage where he fights for the support of the world community to finally support a free Belarus.

For years, he has been warning about Putin and Lukashenko and how they threaten international security.

Armed with business cards and a tie, Sannikov fights for democracy, giving us .. THIS KIND OF HOPE .. that the world can be a better place.