The Minsk City Court sentenced Gennady Mozheiko, a former journalist of Komsomolskaya Pravda in Belarus, to three years in a penal colony on charges of inciting hatred (Article 130 of the Criminal Code) and insulting a government official (Article 369 of the Criminal Code), the Belarusian service of Radio Liberty reports.
Mozheiko is the author of a text about Andrei Zeltser, an employee of the American EPAM Systems, who died in a shootout with KGB officers. An interview with Zeltser’s friend was published on the KP in Belarus website on the evening of September 28, 2021. As the editor-in-chief of Komsomolskaya Pravda Vladimir Sungorkin later said, in its original form the text hung for three minutes, after which it was rewritten and then deleted. On September 29, the publication’s website stopped opening, and a little later, the Ministry of Information confirmed that the site was blocked “for violating the law that posed a threat to national security.” After that, the publication decided to close its branch in Belarus.
At first, Mozheiko was accused only of “inciting hatred” because of the article about Zeltser, but then they added an article about insulting a representative of the authorities because of a recording on a voice recorder, which was confiscated during a search in his apartment. The recording contained the words of deputy Valery Voronetsky from a meeting with voters, who campaigned against the authorities and allegedly called Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who came out with a machine gun to the protesters, “a mad freak.”
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Mozheiko was detained on October 1, 2021. His apartment was searched, but Gennady himself was not at home then. Human rights activists reported that he was detained in Moscow and taken to Minsk. The Belarusian Ministry of Internal Affairs claimed that the journalist left for Russia and from there tried to get “to a third country”, but the Russian security forces did not let him out. According to the agency, he returned to Belarus, he was detained at the Minsk airport upon arrival.
Russian officials initially reacted negatively to the journalist’s detention. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said: “We proceed from the fact that the rights of journalists will be respected in accordance with generally accepted international norms.”
Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov stated that the position regarding restrictions on the work of Komsomolskaya Pravda was clearly indicated: “We do not agree with this, we expect the lifting of these restrictions and ensuring the free operation of our publication on the territory of Belarus.”
However, after the closure of the Komsomolskaya Pravda branch in Belarus, Peskov said that this was the “only correct” decision. He also pointed out that Mozheiko “is not a citizen of Russia, therefore Moscow has no legal grounds to protect his interests and to interfere in any way in his relations with the Belarusian authorities.”
The Union of Journalists of Russia demanded from Minsk to immediately release the journalist Mozheiko.
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