Svetlana Tikhanovskaya refuses to call what’s happening this weekend in Belarus an election.

“It’s a sham,” the exiled opposition leader says. “This is a military-style operation; a performance staged by the regime to hold on to power.”

For three decades, the country has been led by an increasingly authoritarian Alexander Lukashenko, now firmly backed by Vladimir Putin who makes use of his neighbour in his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

This Sunday, Belarusians will see Lukashenko’s name on the ballot paper once again, with four other names chosen carefully to be no challenge.

No independent observers are allowed.

The tight controls have bene put in place because last time Belarusians voted for a president, the country was swept by giant protests.

In 2020, Alexander Lukashenko allowed Svetlana Tikhanovskaya to run against him, thinking that a political novice – and a woman – would make no impact.

It was a massive miscalculation.

Tikhanovskaya, who decided to stand in place of her husband after Lukashenko put him in jail, claimed victory.

When Lukashenko was awarded 80% of the vote, crowds took to the streets in the biggest ever threat to Lukashenko’s rule. The protests were ultimately crushed by riot police with mass arrests and brute force.

The European Union then refused to recognise Lukashenko’s legitimacy as president.

Today, all the key opposition figures from the period are in prison or have fled abroad, like Tikhanovskaya. Former protesters still in Belarus have been scared into silence.

So the opposition leader is not urging them to take to the streets again on Sunday.

“We call on Belarusians to reject this sham and on the international community to reject the result,” she tells the BBC. “But I say to Belarusians, you have to keep safe until the real moment of possibility.

“Because people live in constant fear, and the regime is now intensifying the repression.”

You feel that fear straight away when you speak to Belarusians.

Many don’t want to talk publicly about politics at all. Others ask you to change their names, then choose their words carefully.

Some still inside Belarus chat only via encrypted messages which they delete immediately.

All say open political activism in the country has been extinguished.

Bysol, a non-profit organisation which helps evacuate those in danger, reports a surge in applications to around 30 or 40 requests a month.

Since 2020, the group has evacuated more than 1,500 people.

It also supports former political prisoners trying to rebuild life in exile after their release.

For Yana Zhuravleva, a vet, that’s been tough.

Prior to 2020 she was devoted to her work and not particularly politically active. But that summer she joined the giant crowds, hopeful of change.

She was later sentenced to three years for a “gross violation of public order”.

“We would get punished for everything,” she recalls of her time in prison.

She calculates that about 1 in 10 of the women were there because of the protests. Like them, Yana was added to the register of those “inclined to extremism and destructive activity”.

“You can’t go to the sports hall, your only letters are from relatives and you get fewer visiting rights. If you complain you always hear the same response: remember what you’re here for,” she tells me from Poland, where she moved after her recent release.

Yana admits it took “titanic” strength not to slide into deep depression.

“In prison, I barely cried. But when I was out, I suddenly wanted to sob all the time, and didn’t know why.”

Several people I contacted have mentioned seeking psychological help, after being interrogated, threatened or imprisoned.

They describe a security service that hunts down anyone with the loosest link to the opposition, then demands names from all those it detains.

The pressure has never let up.

One woman inside Belarus, who used to monitor human rights, tells me she’s had to stop attending court hearings because the authorities spotted her.

If they could prove any link to the banned human rights organisation Viasna, she could be charged as an “extremist”.

“I can do some specific acts of support, but I have to be careful,” she told me anonymously.

“You have a very strong sense of helplessness when you see all this injustice.”

Viasna currently lists 1,256 political prisoners in Belarus. Dozens were given amnesties recently, but they were soon replaced.

For those who do escape the pressure-cooker of Belarus, there is the added struggle of knowing they may not return for a long time.

That’s why Natalia, not her real name, decided to stay in Belarus even after she was detained twice for participating in the protests.

“You’re very vulnerable once you’re on the list of the ‘repressed’,” she explains.

“You can’t get work because you are on the police data base and the authorities always have an eye on you…”

For Natalia that meant being arrested again, initially for walking her dog without a lead.

“They claimed I’d been aggressive and cursed loudly and waved my arms,” she remembers, of her detention in 2023. She was held for ten days with up to 14 people in a cell for two, a light on constantly.

For over a week, she slept on the wooden floor.

“It really shook my sense of security, I became much more anxious,” Natalia confides.

She’s abroad for now and plans to return soon, to her cats. But her neighbours say a police officer just visited her house, checking up on all potential protesters ahead of Sunday’s vote.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya believes the ongoing repression shows that Lukashenko and his allies are afraid.

“The trauma of 2020 is still alive and he has to eliminate any possibility of uprising,” the opposition leader argues.

“He knows the Belarusians didn’t accept or forgive him, and they still want change.”

But she admits there’s little sign of that in the short-term.

For a time after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Belarusians hoped their neighbours might succeed in defeating Putin with Western help, and that Lukashenko would follow him.

Some headed for the front line themselves, choosing force after their peaceful protests had failed.

But Ukraine’s military is now struggling to hold ground and President Donald Trump is pushing for peace talks.

“The democratic world can’t make concessions to Putin,” Tikhanovskaya argues, describing Lukashenko as equally dangerous to the world.

He let Russia launch missiles at Ukraine from Belarus and send its tanks through his territory.

He’s also allowed the free flow of migrants to the Polish border and into the EU.

“He allows Putin to deploy nuclear weapons and his army in Belarus, and it’s a very short path to Poland and Lithuania,” Tikhanovskaya points out.

“He and Putin are a pair, and they support other dictators. He’s part of this chain of evil.”

There is little doubt that Sunday’s reinstatement of Alexander Lukashenko will go according to his plan.

“Those people are very capable,” explains Yana, the former political prisoner.

“They really did crush the potential for protest.”

She’s now trying to return to her profession as a vet, but in Poland, and to recover from three tough years behind bars.

Those I spoke to now see Lukashenko retiring, or eventually dying, as their greatest hope of seeing democracy.

In the meantime, many are switching focus: there’s been a surge of interest in reviving the Belarusian culture and language, an opposition cause. It’s the most many dare do in such circumstances.

“No-one says it openly, but we feel like there are no prospects. There’s depression,” Natalia admits.

But there are no obvious regrets, even so.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya’s own life has changed dramatically since she was thrust into politics.

Cut-off from her country, her husband is also a political prisoner – kept in total isolation for almost two years.

The opposition leader insists she still “truly believes” in change.

“2020 was a huge shift in mentality in Belarus. I don’t know how long it will take, but that shift will not disappear.”

The teenager who murdered three children, Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar, and Bebe King, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last July will serve a minimum of 52 years in prison.

Axel Rudakubana had a long-standing obsession with violence, killing and genocide, but prosecutors said there is no evidence he ascribed to any particular political or religious ideology.

He admitted a terrorism offence for downloading an al-Qaeda training manual. But the knife attack has not been treated as terrorism by police or prosecutors, and the judge stressed that he “must accept” that there was no evidence of terrorist cause.

He added, however, that Rudakubana’s culpability is “equivalent to terrorist matters, whatever its purpose”.

Following Rudakubana’s guilty pleas earlier this week, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer declared “terrorism has changed” and Britain is facing a “new threat”.

In the past, he said, the main threat was organised groups like al-Qaeda, but that we now also face extreme violence from “loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom, accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety”. They are sometimes inspired by traditional terrorist groups, he said, but are fixated on extreme violence, seemingly for its own sake.

But what the prime minister described has been happening for years.

“This is not a new threat,” says Barnaby Jameson KC, who has spent years prosecuting terror cases. “In the last decade we have seen a plethora of terrorist cases involving young males who have become self-radicalised in isolation online.”

What is new is that the prime minister has now indicated this problem must be urgently addressed.

The question now is how he will do it – and, if this has been going on for so many years, why has it taken until now to do so?

At present, the police, courts and MI5 work to a definition in the Terrorism Act 2000.

That defines terrorism as the use or threat of violence designed to influence the government, an international governmental organisation, or to intimidate the public or a section of it, with the use or threat of violence for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.

Put simply, for an attack to be treated as terrorism the authorities must conclude it was for some kind of cause.

But various terror offences can be – and are – used to charge and disrupt people who are not defined by prosecutors as having a terrorist motive. On the flipside, it is also true that cases which some think should be classed as terrorism, are not.

Several recent cases show how fluid the counter-terror system can be when presented with cases falling outside the main ideologies, showing these issues are not as new as the prime minister suggests.

Counter-terror police, with their particular focus on preventing violence in the first place, have investigated plots that are not defined as terrorism, including two teenagers jailed in 2018 for planning a school massacre in North Yorkshire.

Another investigation prevented a massacre in Cumbria the same year. The “loner” responsible was convicted of possessing terrorist manuals, but prosecutors said the motive was “not terrorism” and related to hatred and revenge.

In 2021, a 16-year-old boy from Birmingham admitted three terror offences for possessing gun and bomb manuals. He had a general fascination with terrorism, violence and so-called ‘incels’.

From age 11, he had constantly posted in a forum about the Columbine massacre. The prosecution case was that he did not hold any fixed ideology.

On the other side of the spectrum, a vehicle attack in Westminster in 2018 – in which a man drove at cyclists and police officers outside Parliament – was prosecuted and sentenced as terrorist-linked, despite no evidence of any extremist motive, on the basis that the act and location meant the attacker must have been acting for a terrorist purpose.

The case shows a motive does not need to be clear for a case to be treated as terrorism.

But a notorious double murder that was inspired by an extreme ideology – the stabbings of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in a London park in 2020 – were not defined as terrorism despite the killer clearly being motivated by his adherence to Satanism and the occult.

It is up to the police, namely the senior national co-ordinator for counterterrorism, to declare an incident as terrorism.

In the past, this has happened quickly in notorious cases, including after the Manchester Arena bombing and the Westminster Bridge attack. Both were carried out by known extremists.

One reason why police may now take longer before making a declaration – even an incident that may appear likely to be classed as terrorism – is because of an explosion in a taxi outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital in 2021, which was initially declared a terrorist incident.

After a long investigation, however, detectives eventually concluded there was no evidence the Liverpool bomber held extremist views of any kind and that his precise motive remained unknown, but it was likely driven by anger towards the British state for repeated rejections of his asylum claim and exacerbated by his own mental health struggles.

Despite such examples, the central focus for MI5 and police is terrorism as defined by the law, rather than a broader group of people presenting a more general risk of violence.

If the government is now going to ask that more time be devoted to this wider group, MI5 and the police may well ask for more resources.

As things stand, both are currently devoting increasing time to investigating state espionage in the UK, particularly from Russia, Iran and China, which means they’re spending less time on terrorism investigations.

Within those investigations, detectives focused on the extreme right spend an increasing amount of time dealing with young people who engage in a range of harmful activity, including sexual offences.

Certain online spaces have seen a blending with the occult, Satanism, misogyny, and a general ultra-violent misanthropy, creating toxic new groups that bleed back into the real worlds.

Some of those involved are often mentally vulnerable, creating additional sensitivities around interventions, whether they involve criminal investigations or not.

Some neo-Nazi groups created by teenagers and young people online have been outlawed as terrorist organisations, joining a list that includes Hamas and the IRA.

The challenge of preventing lone attackers in the UK is nothing new. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the main threat was from elaborate plots directed by groups like al-Qaeda, such as the plan to blow up transatlantic planes using bombs disguised as drinks.

This era saw the creation of the main terrorism laws now in use, which defined a series of offences – including preparing acts of terrorism and possessing terrorist instructions – that we see in the courts, used to disrupt and stop people before they commit acts of violence.

But with the emergence of the Islamic State (IS) group over a decade ago, the threat moved away from plots directed by organisations and towards acts of violence by individuals inspired by online propaganda and instructions from groups like IS, but who might have no direct contact with them.

In the decade since there have been multiple plots and attacks by lone actors, including people using knives and vehicles as weapons, making it harder to spot their plans because the preparations are relatively low-key.

Extreme right-wing violence, which has emerged as a major issue, has predominantly followed the same pattern: plots and attacks by lone actors, often very young, who are typically inspired by material accessed online.

For years, counter-terror police have been registering their concerns about this group. (Indeed, they are only a group because the authorities have defined them as such.)

The point is illustrated by the number of them referred to Prevent, the government-led counter-extremism programme. In the year to March 2020, 51% were for individuals with a “mixed, unstable or unclear ideology”, of which almost half had no concern identified following an initial assessment.

In the years since, the way in which that group is classed has changed, with newer categories for concerns about school massacre radicalisation and the misogynistic incel ideology, which makes direct comparisons over the years difficult.

However, the government’s own figures for 2023/2024 show the largest single group referred to Prevent – 36%, meaning 2,489 people – were defined as individuals with a vulnerability present but no ideology or counter terror risk, with 19% classed as extreme right-wing, 13% as Islamist radicalisation, and 2% relating to concerns regarding school massacres.

From these thousands of Prevent referrals, 7% were adopted as cases requiring intervention by a multi-agency panel. But the figures for interventions show how the largest group of original referrals – the mix of people with a general interest in violence but no clear ideology – get increasingly filtered out of the programme.

For cases involving intervention, 45% related to extreme right-wing radicalisation, 23% to Islamist radicalisation, 18% to individuals with “conflicted concerns”, and 4% for school massacre concerns.

The Southport attacker himself was referred to Prevent three times by “education providers” because of concern about his interest in violence and extremism, but each time officers assessed he did not need meet the threshold for intervention – assessments since found to be wrong by an official review.

When you get to actual investigations by MI5, which is the UK’s lead agency for counter terrorism, the figures change again, with the organisation’s director general Ken McCallum saying last year that 75% relate to Islamist extremism and 25% to the extreme right.

However, he acknowledged that “straightforward labels like ‘Islamist terrorism’ or ‘extreme right wing’ don’t fully reflect the dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies we see,” and that MI5 is encountering more people accessing “both extreme right wing and Islamist extremist instructional material, along with other bits of online hatred, conspiracy theories and disinformation.”

What the figures show is that a large group of people – about whom there are real concerns – neither end up in Prevent, nor being investigated by MI5 or counter-terror police.

The prime minister said this week it may be that such people are “harder to spot,” adding that we “can’t shrug our shoulders and accept that”.

But what his government is proposing to do about it is currently unclear.

The government could consider broadening the definition of terrorism or creating new offences to tackle the threat of violence from non-terror offenders.

It could also change the way in which the threat of violence from non-terror suspects is monitored and managed.

Neil Basu, the Met’s former head of counter-terror policing, this week said that a “Prevent for non-terrorists” is now necessary and will require a “big bill” if we want to be safe.

The government has appointed Lord Anderson KC, a former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, to review the Prevent scheme, although it was the subject of a highly critical review two years ago commissioned by the previous government.

Jonathan Hall KC, the current independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has been asked by the government to consider whether the definition does need to change. Speaking to the BBC, he says: “There appear to be three reasons for expanding the definition of terrorism.

“The sense that only terrorism captures the horrors of attacks like the one by Rudakubana; because doing so brings in counter-terrorism powers; and because terror laws focus on pre-cursor offences and preventing attacks in the first place.

“However, to change the definition you would need to work out what violence to include, and what to exclude.

“If it was no longer necessary to prove a political, religious, racial or ideological cause, would the touchstone be methodology, or number of victims, or desire for notoriety or terrorising impact? Would serial killers like Lucy Letby be included or not?”

On the question of which resources are used to tackle the threat, he argues that “we must ask who is responsible for the risk posed by people like Rudakubana. This is about risk management and public protection by law enforcement, not welfare interventions.

“We can learn from how terrorist subjects of interest are managed by every mechanism available, such as non-terrorism prosecutions or use of civil orders.”

Now the Southport attacker has been sentenced, the focus will be on what the government next does to tackle the issues articulated by the prime minister.

Top picture credit: Merseyside Police and PA

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Some online sites are prescribing men a hair loss drug that has potentially risky side effects without consistent safety checks, the BBC has found.

The side effects of finasteride can include suicidal thoughts and impotence, yet some big brand companies will send the pills in the post without seeing or chatting with the customer.

Kyle, who is 26 and from Wakefield, regrets buying the pills online after filling out a ‘tick-box’ form.

He says his life has been turned upside down by an all too quick decision.

Kyle started taking finasteride last spring, after it was recommended to him by a mate who was on it.

He says he did a bit of research beforehand, but buying it online was simple.

“I just typed it in on Google and it came up with all these online pharmacies,” Kyle says.

“It’s everywhere. It’s so easily accessible.”

The prescription pills arrived on his doorstep within a week of ordering them.

“I had no consultation with a doctor. No zoom meeting. I didn’t have to send any pictures to them or anything like that to actually make sure I did have male pattern baldness.

“I started it and, yeah – that was the biggest mistake of my life.”

Since taking the drug, Kyle says he’s been having problems with his sexual, mental and physical health – problems he had never experienced before and which have persisted since he stopped the medication.

“Life just feels grey. It’s, like, castrated my emotions,” Kyle says.

“It just stripped everything from me – all my personality and everything. I stopped going out with my mates, stopped playing football and started having all these issues.”

Finasteride is one of the most common pills for hair loss, taken by tens of thousands of men in the UK. It is only available by private prescription.

It works by stopping testosterone turning into another hormone, called dihydrotestosterone (DHT), that can stop hair growing.

Kyle took it for about six weeks, but stopped after experiencing problems including suicidal thoughts.

In late April 2024 – just weeks after Kyle got his prescription – UK regulators took urgent action over finasteride, saying packs must contain a special safety alert card warning of the small risk of severe side effects including suicidal thoughts and sexual dysfunction.

After being contacted by other men like Kyle through Your Voice, Your BBC News, we asked a male colleague to buy finasteride from three leading online providers to see what the checks now involved.

Online prescriber ‘Hims’ mentioned the side effects.

Superdrug also offered the option to chat with a doctor – that cost extra.

Only Boots pharmacy asked for a photo of hair loss.

When some packs arrived, none contained the new patient alert card that drug makers were asked to add.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory agency says manufacturers have been given up to a year to comply, but it might take longer.

Boots, Hims and Superdrug say online finasteride customers are asked to confirm that they have read and understood the possible risks.

They say until the alert cards are “rolled out” and put in packs, users can read the long patient information leaftlet already included with the medicine to learn about side effects.

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society says online prescribing can be very useful for a lot of patients, particularly if they are too embarrassed to visit a doctor. But the checks must be robust.

James Davies, RPS director for England told BBC News: “It’s really important that regardless of whether it’s online or face to face, these thorough checks are taking place.

“That means that a full medical history is taken, there’s an opportunity to understand the medication that may be prescribed, the side effects, the risks and the benefits.”

He said sharing photos of the hair loss with the prescriber and having a video call to discuss all of the issues could be useful.

The British Association of Hair Restoration Surgery (BAHRS) believes patients shouldn’t get the drug just by filling out an online form.

Greg Williams, hair transplant surgeon and vice president of BAHRS, says although finsasteride is a good treatment for many, the small chance of serious side effects must be explained and closely monitored.

“There will be some patients who have risk factors that might make finasteride a risky prescription. I’m not saying it can’t be prescribed, but patients need to be appropriately counselled.”

Europe’s drug regulator is doing its own safety review of finasteride which could include a ban.

Nearly a year since first ordering the drug, Kyle says he deeply regrets taking finasteride.

“It’s just a little pill. You take it and don’t really think about what it can do to you,” he says.

“Every day I beat myself up saying like ‘You had a perfect life, you didn’t have to risk something over hair’.

“It was vain of me…but when you get insecure you do stupid things.

“If I were made aware of what it can do I never would have took it.”