As police raided the home of a gay couple in the Belarusian capital of Minsk and brutally beat them, the officers didn’t hide that the crackdown was aligned to similar moves in neighboring Russia. The students, Andrei and Sasha, said security forces demanded that they unlock their smartphones and surrender the names of “gays in Minsk and Moscow.” “They slammed our heads against the door frame, threatened to report us to the university and said that this was just the beginning,” said Andrei, 20, who like other gay and transgender Belarusians interviewed by The Associated Press insisted on being identified only by his first name because of safety concerns.