Son of detained ex-journalist found in orphanage. His father about to arrive from Siberia

The food par­cel for Larysa was not accept­ed by the deten­tion cen­ter admin­is­tra­tion. She is like­ly to be trans­ferred to a pre-tri­al facil­i­ty soon.

The rea­sons for Shchyrakova’s deten­tion are still unknown. Accord­ing to her fam­i­ly, on 6 Decem­ber law-enforce­ment offi­cers raid­ed the pri­vate house where the woman lives. So far, she does not have a lawyer.

Larysa’s rel­a­tives man­aged to con­tact Sviataslau’s father, who has lived in Novosi­birsk for a long time. He is the first per­son on the list of poten­tial offi­cial guardians.

Ex-journalist’s home was already searched a year ago by the Finan­cial Inves­ti­ga­tions Depart­ment. As a result, her phone, pho­to and video equip­ment, and data car­ri­ers (hard dri­ves and flash dri­ves) were seized.

At the inter­ro­ga­tion that fol­lowed, Larysa refused to tes­ti­fy against her­self. She also was banned from dis­clos­ing the details of the case. At that time, sim­i­lar search­es took place in the homes of pub­lic activists in Homel, Rechyt­sa, Kalinkavichy, and Mazyr.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, Larysa Shchyrako­va coop­er­at­ed with inde­pen­dent pub­li­ca­tions. But back in 2021, she pub­licly stat­ed that she was quit­ting jour­nal­ism because of the harass­ment she had to endure for work­ing with­out accred­i­ta­tion. Ex-jour­nal­ist was held admin­is­tra­tive­ly liable over 40 times, includ­ing for her cov­er­age of post-elec­tion protests. She would not get arrest­ed only because she was rais­ing her minor son alone.

By train­ing, Shchyrako­va is an Eng­lish teacher. She used to head the local his­to­ry orga­ni­za­tion Tala­ka, now liq­ui­dat­ed by the author­i­ties.

Over the past few months, the ex-jour­nal­ist has been engaged in eth­nic pho­to shoots – tak­ing pic­tures of peo­ple in Belaru­sian folk cos­tumes and relat­ed places. This year she enrolled in a psy­chol­o­gy course. Despite the threats, Shchyrako­va chose to stay in Belarus.

She made doc­u­men­taries and imple­ment­ed her own project to hon­or the repressed in the USSR titled “The Mur­dered and For­got­ten.” Shchyrako­va record­ed the tes­ti­monies of rel­a­tives of the repressed dis­si­dents and used those records to pro­duce pub­li­ca­tions and doc­u­men­taries. Larysa also starred in movies, in par­tic­u­lar, play­ing the role of a famous com­pa­tri­ot, Palu­ta Baduno­va, a girl of the Belaru­sian Renais­sance, in a doc­u­men­tary of the same name with ele­ments of stag­ing.

Three years ago, Larysa Shchyrako­va orga­nized an edu­ca­tion­al project at the “Medi­a­pas­to­ra” event space, where fans of video cam­eras and pho­to lens­es learned the basics of jour­nal­ism. Famous jour­nal­ists, includ­ing those from Swe­den, passed on their expe­ri­ence with­in the project.

In Sep­tem­ber this year, after the deten­tion of her for­mer col­league Yauhen Merkis, Shchyrako­va talked about the arrests of jour­nal­ists on her social media and shared infor­ma­tion about actions of sol­i­dar­i­ty with Merkis that took place abroad.