Yauhen Bulka moved to Poland. And told how he was sent to work on abortions in Israel

Yauhen Bulka is a Belarusian showman, TV presenter, and actor. Among other things, he was the host of a morning show on ONT and a resident of the Belarusian Comedy Club.

In 2020, Bulka supported the protest movement. After this, he was blacklisted and effectively lost the opportunity to work in his profession in Belarus. In 2022, he and his family moved to Israel, and after the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, to the United Arab Emirates.

Bulka and his family now live in Poland. In August 2026, he joined the NEXTA Plus team.

In a conversation with Sasha Ivulin, he calls the constant relocations, wars, and the need to adapt to new circumstances "an intensified life, life on maximum settings."

"There are moments when you can't get up, don't want to get up, don't want to decide anything. You probably fall into such a self-preservation mode. But not for long. Because my son comes and says, 'Dad, food.' Of course, okay, let's go eat," Yauhen shares personally.

Does he regret his choice in 2020?

During the conversation, Sasha Ivulin asked Yauhen if he would have acted differently in 2020 if he had known in advance what awaited him.

"At most, I asked myself that question four times. And each time, only one answer clearly appeared to me: I acted correctly. I don't understand and can't imagine how I could have lived, having agreed with what happened in 2020. Maybe one could have disagreed but remained silent. But this conditional mood... It doesn't solve anything, it doesn't help, it explains nothing.

It already happened. It happened, and I don't regret it. I haven't regretted it once. But if I had acted differently, I might have regretted it. It probably would have eaten me up inside [conscience]. (...)

Happiness is when you can allow yourself to live without compromises, without deals, without concessions. (...)

And compromises, they accumulate and have a way of catching up with you. And sooner or later, the burden of these compromises will simply destroy you. I acted correctly. For myself, I acted correctly. My conscience is clear."

"I have never dealt with so much blood"

When asked which day in emigration was the hardest for him, Bulka recalls the beginning of his work at a plastic surgery center in Israel.

"Back then, I had to look for any job. In principle, medicine was interesting to me in one way or another. So I come and look at the schedule, where I will be training initially. A plastic surgery center. Well, what? Ears, nose, breasts. They send me to gynecology. To abortions. And that was completely outside my value system. Completely!" Yauhen recounts emotionally.

The duties of the orderly included cleaning up medical waste:

"I come. They tell me: 'These buckets with blood from everything, with biomass, direct them there and there.' And I just... I had never dealt with so much blood."

But the physical reaction was only part of the problem. Much more strongly, according to Bulka, he was affected by a moral conflict.

"I had a very strict position. Well, it softened. But this just blew me away."

The situation, as Yauhen recalls, was complicated by the family's overall circumstances after emigration. Money was scarce, financial problems affected relationships at home. Quitting the job was not easy, but Bulka, according to him, could barely force himself to return there the next day.

"My hands were shaking a bit, and I came [from work] thinking: 'That's it, I probably can't do it.' And I didn't know where to find the strength to just get up and go to work again tomorrow. It was as if my world had collapsed.

You live, they tell you 'don't kill,' and here you are doing it all with your own hands — in my imagination at the time. And I think: 'How did all this happen, that I'm doing this? I said I would never, under any circumstances.'"

"And so, there were probably several such moments. Why did I easily leave Israel and go to the Emirates? The pressure you can't cope with, and you think that escape will solve it. (...) It's natural for a person to look for where it's better for them, or at least where they can cope, or at least where there's an option. So moving to the Emirates was probably an option for me," Bulka explains.

However, as he later admitted in the conversation, the project in the Emirates turned out not to be as profitable as he was initially promised.

As Yauhen argues, people often talk about success, but much less often about failures. Although, in his opinion, it is precisely such stories that can be most useful.

"The best thing about all bad stories is that you can tell them. Because if you can't tell them, it means the story ended badly," he reflects.

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