Journalist Pavel Dabravolski sentenced to 9 years in prison

Min­sk City Court on March 6 announced a ver­dict for polit­i­cal pris­on­er and jour­nal­ist Pavel Dabravol­s­ki. He was con­vict­ed of “high trea­son”.

Pavel Dabravol­s­ki. Cour­tesy pho­to

The tri­al began on Feb­ru­ary 27, 2026, and was con­duct­ed behind closed doors.

Accord­ing to infor­ma­tion obtained by BAJ, on March 6, Min­sk City Court found Pavel Dabravol­s­ki guilty under Part 1, Arti­cle 356 of the Crim­i­nal Code and sen­tenced him to 9 years of impris­on­ment.

Pavel Dabravol­s­ki declined to appeal the ver­dict. Tak­ing into account the time the jour­nal­ist has already spent in pre-tri­al deten­tion, the term of impris­on­ment will be approx­i­mate­ly 7 years and 4 months.

Accord­ing to BAJ sources, the “high trea­son” charge is con­nect­ed to Dabravolski’s jour­nal­is­tic pub­li­ca­tions.

He pre­vi­ous­ly worked for both Belaru­sian and for­eign media, includ­ing the Ukrain­ian mag­a­zine NV.ua (before Russia’s full-scale inva­sion of Ukraine). His last work­place in Belarus was the inde­pen­dent news agency Bela­PAN.

Pavel Dabravol­s­ki was detained in Min­sk on Jan­u­ary 22, 2025 — sev­er­al months after return­ing home from abroad.

Pavel left Belarus in ear­ly fall 2021. Accord­ing to his social media pages, after leav­ing he trav­eled around the world: vis­it­ing sev­er­al Euro­pean coun­tries, Iran, Rus­sia, and South Amer­i­can coun­tries. He returned to Min­sk in Octo­ber 2024.

Dur­ing the 2020 post-elec­tion protests, Pavel Dabravol­s­ki was detained and held admin­is­tra­tive­ly liable in con­nec­tion with his pro­fes­sion­al activ­i­ties. In par­tic­u­lar, on Octo­ber 30, 2020, the jour­nal­ist was arrest­ed in his apart­ment and then sen­tenced to 15 days in deten­tion on charges of par­tic­i­pat­ing in an unau­tho­rized ral­ly.

The Belaru­sian human rights com­mu­ni­ty has rec­og­nized Pavel Dabravol­s­ki as a polit­i­cal pris­on­er.

On Jan­u­ary 12, the jour­nal­ist turned 36 behind bars.

Accord­ing to the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists, 28 media work­ers are cur­rent­ly impris­oned in Belarus.