Nowadays, there are 1100 political prisoners in Belarusian prisons, according to the Wiosna human rights centre. Human rights defenders estimate that nearly 30 000 people have been kept in detention centres since summer 2020.
When the protests in Belarus started, the primary form of punishment for casual demonstrators was 15-day isolation in custody. The characters of that story are people who first met in a prison cell - they were to spend the next two weeks there or a month after being arrested by the police in November 2020, when regime forces began to suppress protests with greater strength.