Belarusian journalist Aliaksandr Ignatsiuk is serving a six-year prison sentence after being convicted in April 2024 on charges of extortion, organizing or participating in gross violations of public order, and defaming the president. Belarusian authorities detained him on July 18, 2023.
Ignatsiuk is a freelance journalist who ran Pro Stolin, a news website that covered the southern city of Stolin, as well its YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram accounts, where he has a combined following of 16,800 subscribers. The authorities labeled Ignatsiuk’s Pro Stolin website as “extremist” in February 2024. In June, the Belarusian Ministry of Interior added him to its list of people allegedly involved in extremist activity.
On April 5, a court in Stolin convicted and sentenced Ignatsiuk. The court also fined him 8,000 Belarusian rubles (US$2,450).
On May 28, a Belarusian court upheld Ignatsiuk’s sentence, according to a representative with the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), an advocacy and trade group operating from exile, who spoke to CPJ anonymously, citing fear of reprisal.
The BAJ representative told CPJ they believe Ignatsiuk “was punished for his blogging activities,” adding that “He [Ignatsiuk] openly criticized local authorities, defended farmers’ rights, and criticized pro-government farmers.”
The BAJ representative told CPJ in November 2024 that Ignatsiuk had lost a lot of weight during his imprisonment. Ignatsiuk was not included in CPJ’s 2023 count of imprisoned journalists due to a lack of publicly available information on his detention at the time.
CPJ’s emails to the Belarusian Investigative Committee, the country’s law enforcement agency responsible for investigating crimes, in late 2024 for comment did not receive any reply.
In 2021, authorities searched Ignatsiuk’s home in connection to his coverage.
In the early 2000s, Ignatsiuk was the editor-in-chief of the local newspaper Vecherniy Stolin until pressure from the authorities forced its closure, the BAJ representative told CPJ.