Belarus: Nobel laureate wades into Belarus emblem row

The Belarusian winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, Svetlana Alexievich, is backing a group of four army cadets in her native country at the centre of a row over the country’s national emblem.

Writer and journalist Alexievich has called the cadets “stars, shining in the darkness, real Belarusian officers of whom the country can be proud”, for taking part in a social media campaign to promote the Pahonia – an image of a knight on horseback that served as the national symbol until 1995, the opposition Nasha Niva newspaper reports.