Narodnaya Volya SMM worker detained

“I work for Nar­o­d­naya Volya news­pa­per and admin­is­ter the telegram chan­nel of the pub­li­ca­tion. I joined a few protest march­es, which is the rea­son for my arrest,” she said in the “repen­tance” video.

Anas­ta­sia Sharke­vich has been detained in 2020. On 1 Octo­ber, her home was searched, and her elec­tron­ic devices and per­son­al items were seized. The woman was tak­en to a police depart­ment where she claimed to have been pres­sured psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly. She was even­tu­al­ly released with­out any charges.

Anas­ta­sia Sharke­vich used to work for Bel­tel­era­dio­com­pa­ny, CTV, and Mir TV chan­nels. She joined the Nar­o­d­naya Volya news­pa­per after the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in Belarus.

Nar­o­d­naya Volya’s web­site was blocked in the mid­dle of August 2022. How­ev­er, in Decem­ber 2022, the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion resumed access to it.

The news­pa­per had long been out of print. In 2020, the author­i­ties increased pres­sure on inde­pen­dent print media, and Nar­o­d­naya Volya, one of the old­est inde­pen­dent news­pa­pers in Belarus, fell a vic­tim to that. The Belaru­sian Press House refused to print the news­pa­per, while Belaru­sian Post exclud­ed the edi­tion from the sub­scrip­tion cat­a­log. Russ­ian print­ing press­es declined the requests for print­ing the news­pa­per as well. Nar­o­d­naya Volya had to dis­con­tin­ue the pub­li­ca­tion of the print ver­sion. How­ev­er, users could still sub­scribe to the pdf ver­sion of the news­pa­per.