Media manager Kanstantsin Zalatykh sentenced to 4 years in prison

The defen­dant was charged with sev­er­al polit­i­cal arti­cles, most of which were of a defam­a­to­ry nature, name­ly the pub­lic dis­sem­i­na­tion of infor­ma­tion bring­ing into dis­re­pute the hon­or and dig­ni­ty of a pub­lic offi­cial. It is alleged that the direc­tor of Belorusy i Rynok active­ly expressed «his ten­den­tious posi­tion» on devel­op­ments in Belarus in recent years, includ­ing insult­ing com­ments about top state offi­cials.

On these grounds, the defen­dant was sen­tenced to four years of impris­on­ment.

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.»

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 Belorusy i Rynok 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 belmarket.by.

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