Three legal trials in Minsk attracted maximum attention during the middle of February. One of them has already ended with a verdict – two-year prison sentences to Katerina Bakhavalova and Darya Chultsova, journalists of Belsat, a digital TV channel broadcasting from Poland and not accredited in Belarus. The criminal code article under which they were convicted reads, “Organization and preparation of actions that grossly violate public order, or active participation in them”. What these journalists did was stream a broadcast from one of the residential high-rise apartments overlooking the so-called Square of Change, a courtyard of sorts where symbols of the protest movement had been repeatedly displayed since August 2020. It is there that on Nov. 11, Roman Bondarenko, an artist, was apprehended by police and subsequently delivered to a hospital, where he died of traumas he sustained while in custody. A memorial in his honor was set up in that square, and a crowd of mourners gathered on Nov. 15 but was dispersed by police, which arrested some of the people taking part and removed the memorial. The two Belsat journalists were broadcasting the whole scene live when police entered the apartment and arrested them as well.
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Belsat TV journalists Katerina Bakhvalova (R) (reporting for the TV channel under the name of Andreeva) and Daria Chultsova (L), who were detained in November while reporting on anti-government protests and face up to three years in prison on charges of organising illegal demonstrations, embrace each other in a defendants' cage before the start of their trial in Minsk on Feb. 9, 2021.
