As he stepped off the flight to Istanbul on August 21, 2025, the forty-something bearded man in a brown T-shirt blended in easily with his fellow travelers. “Landed,” he texted his wife, who responded with a heart emoji.
A few hours later, the man arrived to the seaside resort of Trabzon, on Turkey’s northeastern Black Sea coast, and headed for the city’s marina.
It was there that the last known image of Anatol Kotau was captured at 6:35 p.m. as he passed through the port’s border control. In the photograph, Kotau looks up at the camera, a blank expression on his face.
Kotau was no ordinary tourist. He is a Belarusian official-turned-dissident who had fled his country’s autocratic regime and taken refuge in neighboring Poland. He was actively wanted in Belarus, Russia, and several other former Soviet allies for what Belarusian authorities deemed to be “anti-state” activity.
He never returned home from the trip to Turkey. His whereabouts — and whether he is still alive — have been a mystery ever since.
But a joint investigation by the Belarusian Investigative Center (BIC), Deutsche Welle, and OCCRP has now uncovered new details about the dissident’s disappearance.
Reporters drew on police documents, corporate records, surveillance footage, passenger manifests, border records, satellite imagery, social media posts, and interviews to reconstruct Kotau’s final hours aboard a pleasure yacht in the Black Sea.
Anatol Kotau (left), seen on the left in the surveillance footage, was recorded entering Turkey at the Istanbul Airport Border Gate on August 21, 2025.
The investigation reveals that the yacht carrying Kotau and three other passengers was likely intercepted off the coast of Abkhazia, the Moscow-backed breakaway Georgian region that is home to a large Russian military presence.
Sources familiar with the incident told reporters Kotau was taken from the yacht onto a patrol boat. While OCCRP could not independently confirm what happened at sea, satellite imagery obtained by reporters shows what appears to be a Russian coast guard boat leaving a base in the vicinity used by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) shortly before the sources said the interception took place.
Russia's coast guard is part of the FSB, the country's powerful domestic spying agency.
Satellite imagery showing a boat departing a nearby FSB base in Ochamchire, off the coast of Abkhazia, shortly before sources said the interception occurred at sea.
The passenger manifest reveals the identities of those who sailed on the yacht alongside Kotau that day. They include two Russian men — one of them a local city functionary in the ruling United Russia party — who subsequently disembarked in Abkhazia instead of returning to Turkey with others aboard the boat.
Records also show that just before Kotau boarded the vessel in Trabzon, another Belarusian man stepped off it. The man was previously employed by a company owned by a member of Belarus’ State Security Committee, the national intelligence agency that goes by the acronym of its Soviet-era predecessor, KGB.
That ex-KGB member also has a personal history with Kotau, reporters found. He was described as a “friend” on the guest list of Kotau’s planned wedding celebration in 2020, and the pair had been photographed together in Belarus on multiple occasions, emails and social media posts show.
Many questions about the events of the day remain unanswered, including whether Kotau was aware that these other passengers would be sailing on the yacht, what he knew about them, and why he was in their company.
While OCCRP could not confirm what if any role these individuals might have had in his disappearance, the findings raise questions of whether their backgrounds were more than coincidence.
After Kotau vanished, Belarusian officials said he was not in their custody, while Russia’s FSB has also denied knowledge of his whereabouts.
The Belarusian government, the Russian FSB, and the other passengers identified by reporters did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Rising Official To Regime Opponent
Kotau, now 47, rose steadily within the Belarusian government after graduating from a prestigious university in Moscow for diplomats that is heavily attended by students from former Soviet countries.
He began his career at the Belarusian Foreign Ministry, before moving to the embassy in Warsaw and then taking a role with the presidential administration back in Minsk. In 2015, he was appointed Secretary General of the National Olympic Committee, headed by President Aleksander Lukashenko himself.
Anatol Kotau at the 2024 Play the Game conference in Trondheim, Norway.
But then Kotau’s trajectory shifted. After a short stint in the private sector, he worked at the presidential administration’s Property Management Directorate headed by Viktor Sheiman, a close Lukashenko ally sanctioned by the EU and U.S. over his alleged role in disappearances of political opponents in the late 1990s…
Read the full article at OCCRP →
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