Valery Vilyamovich Tsepkalo or Valery Vilyamavich Tsepkala (; ; born 22 February 1965) is a Belarusian politician and entrepreneur. After graduating from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations with a doctoral degree in international law and serving in the embassy of the Soviet Union in Finland, Tsepkalo joined the staff of the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He later became an advisor on foreign political and economic relations to the Chairman of the Belarusian Parliament, Stanislav Shushkevich, and then a senior advisor to the Secretary General of the Commonwealth of Independent States.
He led Alexander Lukashenko's presidential campaign in the 1994 election and later took the post of First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. From 1997 to 2002, Tsepkalo was the Belarusian Ambassador to the United States and Mexico. In 2005–2006 he was Presidential Plenipotentiary Envoy in the Parliament. In 2005 he established the Belarus High Technologies Park (HTP), and led it until 2017.
In May 2020, Tsepkalo joined the presidential race. He was considered to be a major challenger to incumbent president Alexander Lukashenko, who invalidated the majority of Tsepkalo's nomination signatures to bar him from running for president. In April 2023, he received a 17-year prison sentence in absentia. He acquired Albanian citizenship on 11 April 2025 along with his wife Veronika.
Early life Valery Tsepkalo was born in Grodno on 22 February 1965. He was the only child of chemical engineers William and Nina Tsepkalo, who came to Grodno to build the Grodno Azot nitrogen plant, where they worked all their lives. His father graduated from Odesa Polytechnic Institute, and his mother graduated from Kharkiv Engineering-Economic Institute.
Valery graduated from Grodno Secondary School No.14 with an advanced study of the English language. In 1982 he entered the Belarusian State Technological University in Minsk, but in 1984 he was drafted into the army and served in the Strategic Missile Forces for two years. Due to the Soviet–Afghan War, the deferment for university students at the time was lifted.
After completing his military service, Tsepkalo entered the Moscow State Institute of International Relations of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs and graduated with honors in 1991. He pursued a postgraduate program there, graduated with honors as well, lectured at MGIMO, and obtained his PhD degree in International Law.
Diplomatic career Tsepkalo started his diplomatic career in 1991 as a member of the Soviet Embassy in Finland. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he returned to Belarus and in 1992 took the position of second secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Belarus. In 1993–1994 he was a foreign policy adviser to the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Stanislav Shushkevich, who had a position of the President (Head of the State) at that time. After the resignation of Stanislav Shushkevich from the post of the Chairman of the Supreme Council of Belarus, the position of an advisor on foreign political and economic relations was replaced by the advisor on agriculture. Later Shushkevich recalled Tsepkalo as a "skillful psychologist and professional" and appreciated his help in times when Shushkevich was in disfavour. After resigning, Tsepkalo moved to work in the Commonwealth of Independent States Secretariat as an advisor to the Executive Secretary.
In 1994 during the presidential elections Tsepkalo left Shushkevich and joined the team of Alexander Lukashenko on the recommendation of . Viktar Hanchar, and Alyaksandr Feduta, Yuri Zakharenko were also in Lukashenko's team. Tsepkalo was in charge of international affairs. He organized Lukashenko's trip to the Russian State Duma in Moscow where Lukashenko met head of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Gennady Zyuganov, head of the Agrarians Nikolay Kharitonov, and Liberal Democratic Party of Russia leaders. The trip allowed Lukashenko claim an advantage over other candidates for the presidency regarding Russia–Belarus integration.
In August 1994 Tsepkalo was appointed First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. He participated in the fulfilment of Soviet obligations on the START-II Treaty, the reduction of conventional forces in Europe, "Partnership for Peace" between NATO and former Soviet Republics, and the Cooperative Threat Reduction Treaty. He co-chaired with William J. Perry, the US Secretary of Defense, a joint US-Belarus commission to dismantle nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and associated infrastructure in the former Soviet States. He also co-chaired the joint commissions on border delimitation and demarcation with Lithuania and Latvia. He was also involved in the preparation of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances according to which the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom guaranteed the territorial integrity of three newly independent states that voluntarily refused to possess nuclear weapons and joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
From 1997 to 2002 he was the Ambassador of Belarus to both the United States and Mexico. While ambassador, he visited Silicon Valley and realized the importance of brain drain problem.
After diplomatic service in the US, Tsepkalo became the presidential adviser on science and technologies. During this period he worked as an Alternate Governor of Belarus to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and from February to October 2005 he was a representative in the National Assembly of Belarus. In 2005, he became the Governmental Expert for Secretary-General of the United Nations on communication and information technologies and data security.Group of Governmental Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security In 2009 he also joined the Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies and Development.
High Tech Park
The idea to establish a Belarusian Silicon Valley first appeared when Tsepkalo was visiting Silicon Valley during his diplomatic service in the USA. He was impressed by the effectiveness of the ecosystem, which stimulated the development of technology companies. According to Tsepkalo, it took him a year and a half to persuade the Belarusian authorities to establish infrastructure and a centre of attraction for Belarusian IT companies. On the backdrop of the bursting of the Dot-com bubble, the establishment was very skeptical about the IT industry. He later described his work on popularization of high technologies among public officials in his book Belarus Hi-Tech Park: 10 Years of Development.
Lukashenko announced the creation of the High Tech Park in 2003, and saw it as a modernization tool to boost industries such as agriculture, education, health care and military defense. In July 2004, the head of the Presidential Administration Ural Latypov and Tsepkalo gave an online press conference where they described the future park's concept. The organization was established on 22 September 2005, and on 7 October 2005 Tsepkalo received the director's post. He saw the park as a tool to stop IT experts leaving the country, and as an enabling environment for Belarusian start-ups. In 2009 he called the park the "Belarusian Silicon Valley".
In 2005 the authorities provided 50 hectares of land near Uručča district in Minsk. In ten years the campus grew into a scientific-research centre with offices, conference centres, apartments, hotels and shopping malls. The government guaranteed a one-year $300,000 loan with a 17% interest rate to help get it up and running, which the HTP paid back in two years. The export performance was expected to reach $300–350 million by 2015. A special preferential tax regime was introduced for the HTP.
By 2014, 138 companies were registered in the Park, and its total production reached $650 million. The public image of programming careers rose rapidly; some public schools initiated additional education courses in it. According to Tsepkalo, IT industry growth in Belarus surpassed the world average several times and the HTP's net export exceeded the total of the national industrial plants.
In 2015 a conflict erupted between the government and the HTP administration when the authorities announced a 1% tax raise and tripled its contribution to the Social Security Fund. Tsepkalo warned the authorities of the brain drain danger and referred to data that even with reduced taxes a programmer from HTP paid three times the national average tax. The tax rates were locked until 2020 based on the agreement that the companies from HTP would benefit not only the IT industry but the Belarusian economics in general. Apart from the active defence of HTP residents and employees' interests, Tsepkalo supported detained IT entrepreneurs on multiple occasions. In 2016, he voted for the removal of an "illegal business practices" law from the Criminal Code of Belarus, saying that the rule was "a relic of the Soviet-era" that undermined Belarusian developers' position on foreign markets. Aliaksandr Kaniuk, who was the Prosecutor General then, declared that he was obliged to follow the letter of the law.
On 2 March 2017, Tsepkalo was dismissed from the director's post at the HTP by presidential decree. The news came without warning for HTP employees. According to Tsepkalo, his dismissal was in fact provoked by his active social position and a conflict with security officials. By early 2017 the software development industry annual turnover in Belarus reached $1 billion, with such companies as Wargaming.net, Maps.me, Viber among the HTP membership. In comparison to Ukraine's outsource industry, the Belarusian market was growing 9% faster, while the tax burden was three times higher. The total share of Belarus on the global market reached several basis points. According to the media, Tsepkalo's dismissal had been grounded on his unwillingness to redirect the HTP companies towards the development of other Belarusian industries. Noting Tsepkalo's merits in the creation and development of the HTP, analysts paid attention to its weaknesses: selectivity of the HTP residents, prevalence of outsourcing developers, excessive bureaucratization, and officialism.
After Tsepkalo left the HTP leadership, he was criticised by his successors. The new HTP director Vsevolod Yanchevski said in a media interview that Tsepkalo could have gone to prison even during his leadership of the HTP: charges of tax violations affected one of the companies, they were compensated and the case was closed.
After the HTP, Tsepkalo continued his career in international consulting on innovative enterprises. He consulted governments of the former USSR countries on the establishment of strong IT clusters and took part in a large IT project in Saudi Arabia. He contributed to the development of the Mirzo Ulugbek Innovation Center (ICSU) in Uzbekistan. In 2018 he founded Prabook.com, an online biographical library. His first active comeback to the Belarusian media was in 2018 when he commented on the intended growth of the HTP members' number. According to Tsepkalo, such a step would significantly damage the quality of provided services. Nevertheless, in 2018 HTP got 15 thousand new employees. By 2020, more than 25% of Belarusian start-ups resided in the HTP, innovative technologies accounted for more than a third of country's export.
Presidential campaigns 1994 presidential campaign