«He has not lost his trademark sense of humor.» Media manager Kanstantsin Zalatykh awaiting trial

Natal­lia Zalatykh, the wife of the polit­i­cal pris­on­er, not­ed that her hus­band has not yet been charged, so the prospects of the tri­al are not clear.

«There is no offi­cial indict­ment yet. The tri­al might be sched­uled for Jan­u­ary or Feb­ru­ary. Accord­ing to the lawyer, he is hold­ing up well. At least he did­n’t lose weight or his sense of humor,» Natal­lia shared with the BAJ mon­i­tor­ing ser­vice.

On 18 May 2022, the State Secu­ri­ty Com­mit­tee detained the direc­tor of the coun­try’s old­est eco­nom­ic news­pa­per Belorusy i rynok, Kanstantsin Zalatykh, chief edi­tor Andrei Alek­san­drovich, and accoun­tant Yulia Kakhno.

After ques­tion­ing, Alek­san­drovich and Kakhno were released, and Zalatykh was put in cus­tody on unknown charges. Judg­ing from the con­tent of the deten­tion report, the rea­son was alleged­ly «incit­ing social enmi­ty.» In ear­ly June, the human rights com­mu­ni­ty rec­og­nized Zalatykh as a polit­i­cal pris­on­er.

Accord­ing to Natal­lia, the media man­ag­er can only cor­re­spond with his fam­i­ly, the rest of the let­ters are blocked by cen­sor­ship.

Kanstantsin Zalatykh is an expe­ri­enced media man­ag­er and pro­duc­tion admin­is­tra­tor who has worked with lead­ing inde­pen­dent media and large state enter­pris­es.

On 23 July 2022, access to the news­pa­per’s web­site he worked at was blocked in Belarus «due to ref­er­enc­ing extrem­ist con­tent.» In ear­ly Decem­ber 2022, after 32 years of oper­a­tion, the edi­to­r­i­al board announced that due to dif­fi­cult finan­cial and polit­i­cal con­di­tions, it was sus­pend­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of both the print­ed and elec­tron­ic pdf ver­sions. Con­cur­rent­ly, the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion unex­pect­ed­ly issued an order to restore access to the web­site https://belmarket.by.