Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya urges Polish Foreign Minister to keep Belsat TV

Dur­ing the NATO Pub­lic Forum, Belaru­sian demo­c­ra­t­ic leader Svi­at­lana Tsikhanouskaya met with Pol­ish For­eign Min­is­ter Radosław Siko­rs­ki. Among oth­er things, they dis­cussed the sit­u­a­tion with the Bel­sat TV chan­nel.

Svi­at­lana Tsikhanouskaya told Pol­ish For­eign Min­is­ter Radosław Siko­rs­ki about the crit­i­cal impor­tance and unique­ness of the TV chan­nel.

“I also stressed the need to save and sup­port Bel­sat TV and to sanc­tion the regime in Belarus, not the peo­ple”, Tsikhanouskaya said in her offi­cial account on X.

On July 4, the head of TVP World Michał Bro­ni­a­tows­ki pre­sent­ed a project of tele­vi­sion reform, under which Bel­sat will fall.

“Bel­sat will not be liq­ui­dat­ed. Instead, a new struc­ture will be imple­ment­ed. I want to empha­size that Bel­sat will not dis­ap­pear. Instead, it will acquire new oppor­tu­ni­ties,” assured the head of TVP World. “The changes will be unveiled on 1 March 2025. A new name will be revealed at the same time as the pre­sen­ta­tion of the new struc­ture. The TVP will no longer be includ­ed in the name, but the word ‘Poland’ will be present. The search for a new name is already under­way”.

Experts say that the changes will lead to the loss of a sig­nif­i­cant part of auton­o­my and cuts at the TV chan­nel. And for­mer employ­ee of the TV chan­nel Dzmit­ry Yaho­rau not­ed that “the new man­agers of Pol­ish Tele­vi­sion, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Pol­ish gov­ern­ment (in par­tic­u­lar the Min­istry of For­eign Affairs), with this ‘sig­nif­i­cant reform of for­eign edi­to­r­i­al offices’, will elim­i­nate, if not the chan­nel as a whole, but cer­tain­ly Belsat’s auton­o­my”.