Belarusian journalist Andrei Pakalenka is serving a 12-year prison sentence after being convicted on treason charges on February 26, 2026. Belarusian authorities have detained him since December 2024.
Pakalenka was the deputy director for development of the shuttered independent outlet Intex-Press. Uladzimir Yanukevich, the director and editor-in-chief, was sentenced the same day to 14 years in jail on similar charges.
Their trial, held behind closed doors, started on February 3. There was no explanation for the charges.
The court also fined Yanukevich 135,000 Belarusian rubles (US$47,000) and Pakalenka 45,000 Belarusian rubles (US$16,000). It is also seeking an additional 200,000 rubles (US$69,100) from the two journalists for allegedly inflicting damage on the country, according to the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), an exiled advocacy and trade group.
Belarusian authorities have been harassing former staffers at Intex-Press, an independent regional newspaper covering the western city of Baranavichy, and its journalists for years. In July 2022, Intex-Press journalist Yury Hantsarevich was sentenced to two years and six months in prison on charges of facilitating extremist activities. After Intex-Press was stripped of its registration in 2022, Baranavichy police raided its office, in February 2023. They seized laptops, computers, and a camera. In April 2023, a Belarusian court deemed Intex-Press’s website and social media pages “extremist materials.”
Six of the outlet’s journalists, including Yanukevich and Pakalenka — who had since created independent news website BAR24 — were detained in early December 2024. In August 2025, Natallia Semianovich, Mikita Piatrouski, Ruslan Raviaka, and Ludmila Zeliankova were sentenced to years of house arrest on charges of “promoting extremist activity.”
In February 2026, CPJ emailed the Belarusian Investigative Committee, the law enforcement agency in charge of pretrial proceedings, for comment on Yanukevich and Pakalenka’s case, but did not receive a reply.