In late September 2024, Tsikhanouskaya met with representatives of the Belarusian diaspora in the U.S. She shared on social media platform X that thousands of Belarusians live in Chicago. The video accompanying her post showed several dozen participants at the meeting.
The authors of the Telegram channel ‘ZhS Premium’ published a screenshot of Tsyhankovskaya’s post, labeling her words nonsense.
“‘Thousands of Belarusians in Chicago’ on the line. All these thousands you see on your screens right now. Yes, it's really bad for the fugitives with the agenda, since they have to write such nonsense,” the Telegram channel’s authors claimed.
According to the American Migration Policy Institute, in 2022, just over 70 thousand Belarusians lived in the United States, which corresponds to the population of Zhlobin. Six thousand of them are in the Chicago metropolitan area.
The largest population of Belarusians is in New York, with about 20,000. Philadelphia ranks third, with approximately 3,000.