Dmitry Baiduk scrolls through his phone and stops at a team lineup from June 2015. An under-21s friendly at Oakwell between England and Belarus does not linger in many memories but he can picture it clearly, recalling the moment he came on late in the game to share a pitch with Harry Kane, Danny Ings, Jesse Lingard and Ruben Loftus-Cheek.

Nobody can take that away but these days the images prompt a question: “Would Kane be able to imagine what has happened to me since?”

Probably not. Baiduk’s career was taking off when he took a decision that in effect cut it short. Early in 2021, he was asked by his then employers, Dinamo Brest, to sign a letter in support of Belarus’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. The government had demanded at least 10 players’ signatures in exchange for continued financial support of the club. Along with Vitaliy Gaiduchik, Baiduk refused. Upon learning that five teammates had gone ahead and signed the document, the pair asked for their contracts to be terminated.

They went to a nearby cafe, the deed having been done. “We just drank coffee without speaking,” Baiduk says. “Vitaliy finally asked: ‘Do you have a plan?’ Neither of us did. We had no idea what would happen next but the most important thing was that our consciences and honour were clear.”

It is vanishingly rare for an active Belarusian footballer to speak publicly about how sport and, by extension, those playing it can be abused by a regime that ruthlessly punishes the faintest hint of dissent with up to 12 years in prison. Baiduk has taken a calculated risk in doing so: he wants to spread the message that football is not a viable career in his country for anyone who refuses to toe the government line and that the safety net for thpse who resist is virtually nonexistent.

“Sometimes I think I’m no longer a professional footballer,” he says. Continuing his career in Belarus after leaving Brest was not an option: the letter was circulating around top-flight clubs and he did not need telling that, six months after an election that had brought hundreds of thousands to the streets in protest against Lukashenko, a clampdown was in the air.

He worked as a taxi driver in Minsk for several months but his safety was a constant concern. A contact helped him find a club in Poland. The tiny fourth-tier side Znicz Biala Piska, from the remote north-east, took him on but his new life bears no comparison.

Baiduk is far safer outside Belarus but he is considerably poorer. A Bate Borisov youth product who had ended up at another local powerhouse in the 2019 champions, Brest, his salary back home reached about £2,000 a month. He has moved from Znicz to nearby Mamry Gizycko, whose part-time operation provides a monthly salary of less than £500 that he supplements with daily eight-hour shifts at a woodworking factory. That adds an extra £650 but still brings him well under the average Polish wage. After finishing hard, physical work at 2pm he drives 40 miles to training and is exhausted when the day ends.

He is immensely grateful to the factory owner, Marek Jankowski, who was a board member of Znicz when he joined, for arranging his documentation and both of his jobs upon arriving in Poland. “I like the people here and feel quite comfortable,” he says, but there is little doubt he should be playing on a higher stage.

“My new teammates were surprised to see a player with my level of experience. When they found out why I’m here, they told me I was crazy and had made a big mistake. But it’s better to work in a factory than play with a Belarusian flag on my shirt, as they do back home.”

Sitting next to Baiduk in the bar area of a Warsaw hotel is Alexander Sverchinsky, who can tell his own story of flight. Sverchinsky, a former top-flight player, had attempted to create a formal players’ union in Belarus but his efforts were twice rejected by the Ministry of Justice. When checking in to fly from Minsk airport two years ago, he detected that state operatives had followed him with a view to his arrest. He escaped and, via a terrifying journey through forests and in a boat, arrived in Russia. Now based in Poland, he uses his legal qualifications to fight on behalf of Belarusians who are in dispute with clubs and agents. Last year, he helped win 16 cases; the work is pro bono but he sees no other recourse for colleagues who need help.

“I’ve paid my price for creating an independent union but I will continue to fight, even if I’m going it alone,” Sverchinsky says. He and Baiduk saw, first-hand, how the net tightened on footballers who dared express their views. At Gorodeya, the top-flight club where Baiduk played between his time at Bate and Brest, the team were warned by management to avoid attending the mass demonstrations that swept the country, talking about politics in the dressing room or speaking to opposition media.

In a shocking case, Baiduk’s 19-year-old Gorodeya teammate Rostislav Shavel was imprisoned three times, for more than a month in total, after participating in peaceful protests. Shavel is banned from travelling abroad or signing for another Belarusian club. He has received anonymous financial support, through players sympathetic to Sverchinsky’s union, to aid his recovery from a knee injury but his professional career may be over before it had truly begun.

“Politics is about values, it’s about how you were raised,” says Baiduk, whose late father was a passionate proponent of the democratic values Lukashenko defaces. It is common knowledge in Belarus, although not admitted by the regime, that 48 footballers are blacklisted by the ministry of sport. Most are among 97, Sverchinsky included, who participated in an athletes’ video condemning state violence in 2020. It bans them from signing new contracts in Belarus and, in many cases, has led to termination of existing ones.

Bate Borisov contested last Tuesday’s Champions League first qualifying round tie against Partizani Tirana without four first-teamers whose deals were cancelled, officially by mutual agreement, before the season began in March. The league leaders, Neman Grodno, were without four blacklisted players for their Conference League tie with Vaduz.

Days before the first leg their sporting director, Dmitri Kovalenok, was arrested on the pretext of subscribing to opposition news channels and spreading unwelcome views within the team. He was released after 48 hours but there was no chance of staying employed. Kovalenok had, like Baiduk, refused to sign a letter backing Lukashenko and the regime’s tentacles had eventually found him. Belarusian football is destroying itself from within but the government appears not to care. “Our league wasn’t bad in the past but since the election it has become much worse,” Baiduk says.

The list of abuses against football and its participants stretches on and includes the lengthy prison sentence given to the journalist turned player Aliaksandr Ivulin, interviewed by the Guardian in March. Last year, Sverchinsky submitted a dossier to Fifpro, the global players’ union, detailing the human rights violations inflicted on Belarusian football. It is a sobering read; he had hoped it would help the accession of his union into Fifpro, perhaps in partnership with its counterpart in Lithuania to circumvent its non-recognition in Belarus, but that is yet to reach fruition.

Neither Baiduk nor Sverchinsky blames the many players in Belarus who, despite being repulsed by their government, opt to keep quiet and play on. Many have families to feed or homes to pay for. Sverchinsky is adamant that what he frequently calls “our problem” touches every professional in the nation. The Belarus national team and club sides have been banned from playing competitively against foreign opposition in their own country since the full-scale Ukrainian war began but Uefa and Fifa are yet to harden their stances in the face of allegations that the government has interfered damagingly in the sport.

It should not have to fall upon figures such as Baiduk to endanger themselves by exposing the reality but, even if the youngster who shared a pitch with Kane might have looked on in horror, he would not change anything. “If I had to make this choice again, between supporting a dictator and obeying my conscience, I would choose conscience,” he says.

“No matter how hard my life has become, I don’t regret my decision.”