BAJ piece on dismissed state TV employees deemed “extremist”

Accord­ing to an updat­ed entry on the web­site of the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion, the news sto­ry “From Elite to Out­casts: Anoth­er Win­ner of ‘Telever­shi­na’ Con­test Fired from BelTV” has been declared “extrem­ist” by the deci­sion of the Tsen­tral­ny Dis­trict Court of Min­sk on June 19.

Accord­ing to the BAJ report pub­lished on March 15, secu­ri­ty offi­cers entered the Bel­tel­era­dio­com­pa­ny broad­cast­ing stu­dio and hand­cuffed Andrei Pinchuk, a respect­ed direc­tor. After the “pre­ven­tive con­ver­sa­tion,” he was fired. The most prob­a­ble rea­son was the state­ments of the TV chan­nel work­er which did not ide­o­log­i­cal­ly fit the offi­cial pol­i­cy.

Andrei Pinchuk is one of the most expe­ri­enced TV pro­fes­sion­als in his field. Among oth­ers, he is the win­ner of the pro­fes­sion­al award “Telever­shi­na-2012” in the nom­i­na­tion “The best direc­tor of sports TV shows”.

The arrest of the for­mer head of the Belarus 2 TV chan­nel Vol­ha Hlad­kaya was also men­tioned – in ear­ly May she was sen­tenced to three years of home con­fine­ment. In the office, she kept ser­vice records and mon­i­tored the exe­cu­tion of con­tracts. The woman resigned from Bel­tel­era­dio­com­pa­ny in Sep­tem­ber 2020, which coin­cid­ed with mass protests against the stolen pres­i­den­tial elec­tion and unlaw­ful use of vio­lence by the police. As a result, Hlad­kaya was charged with par­tic­i­pa­tion in an unau­tho­rized assem­bly.

Human rights activists also received a video fea­tur­ing plain-clothed police detain­ing the for­mer cor­re­spon­dent of the CTV, Dzmit­ry Bayarovich, and his wife Vale­ria.

Dzmit­ry Bayarovich was an elite CTV mem­ber and worked in the appa­ra­tus. He orga­nized polls of the par­tic­i­pants of the so-called All-Belaru­sian People’s Assem­bly, accom­pa­nied inspec­tors dur­ing legal enti­ty checks, and took com­ments from pro-regime experts on “Russia’s peace­ful pol­i­cy” and “encroach­ment on the free­dom of speech in Ukraine”.

How­ev­er, Dzmit­ry Bayarovich unex­pect­ed­ly resigned and was ques­tioned by “law enforce­ment”.

A num­ber of for­mer employ­ees of state tele­vi­sion chan­nels have already been sen­tenced to long prison terms.

For exam­ple, jour­nal­ist Kse­nia Lut­ski­na (two “Telever­shi­na” awards hold­er) was sen­tenced to 8 years in prison for “con­spir­a­cy to take over state pow­er”. Dzmit­ry Luk­sha, a for­mer anchor of the BelTV news­reel, was sen­tenced to 4 years in prison for “dis­cred­it­ing the state”. The for­mer head of the “pres­i­den­tial pool” Dzmit­ry Sem­chanka (award­ed “Telever­shi­na” in the same year as Andrei Pinchuk) was sen­tenced to 3 years in prison for incit­ing social enmi­ty.

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