Four Baranavichy journalists sentenced to home confinement on “extremism” charges

The updat­ed Novem­ber 11 list of indi­vid­u­als alleged­ly involved in “extrem­ist activ­i­ty,” pub­lished by the Belaru­sian Min­istry of Inter­nal Affairs, now includes the names Natal­lia Semi­anovich, Miki­ta Pia­trous­ki, Rus­lan Ravi­a­ka, and Lud­mi­la Zelianko­va. All four worked for BAR24, a Baranavichy news out­let cre­at­ed by the for­mer team of the inde­pen­dent region­al news­pa­per Intex-Press.

Accord­ing to the police web­site, all four were con­vict­ed for “aid­ing extrem­ist activ­i­ty”. For each of them, the reg­istry notes: “con­vic­tion not expunged.” This indi­cates that the jour­nal­ists were sen­tenced to home con­fine­ment — a restric­tion of lib­er­ty with­out place­ment in a cor­rec­tion­al facil­i­ty, but with an oblig­a­tion to fol­low a strict super­vi­so­ry regime.

The crim­i­nal cas­es stem from the mass deten­tions of Intex-Press staff in Decem­ber 2024, after the author­i­ties had liq­ui­dat­ed the pri­vate­ly owned out­let.

Intex-Press had faced pres­sure before. On Feb­ru­ary 15, 2023, law enforce­ment offi­cers searched the premis­es of Intex-Press Pub­lish­ing House, seiz­ing sys­tem units, a cam­era, lap­tops — includ­ing employ­ees’ per­son­al devices — as well as the account­ing and adver­tis­ing depart­ments’ equip­ment. The next day, a cor­re­spon­dent was detained after being sum­moned for ques­tion­ing.

On May 4, 2023, Belaru­sian author­i­ties blocked access to the pop­u­lar Baranavichy news web­site. The deci­sion was issued by Brest Region pros­e­cu­tor Vik­tar Kli­mau, who cit­ed alleged numer­ous vio­la­tions of the Mass Media Act. Accord­ing to the prosecutor’s office, the out­let had “repeat­ed­ly pub­lished infor­ma­tion that clear­ly por­trayed the socio-polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in the coun­try neg­a­tive­ly after the elec­tion cam­paign and dis­cred­it­ed the work of state and law-enforce­ment bod­ies.”