Dzianis Ivashin, a Belarusian journalist with vast experience in reporting on Russia’s war in Ukraine, has been held in jail for almost a week on charges of resistance to authority.
According to his relatives and colleagues, the operatives of the Belarusian Committee for State Security, or KGB, grabbed the activist late on March 12 in the city of Grodno, and his apartment was also searched.
Ivashin served as the chief editor with the Belarusian chapter of InformNapalm, an international investigative journalism project particularly exposing Russian military activity in the occupied territories of Ukraine and elsewhere on the basis of open-source evidence.
According to the project members, Ivashin was arrested likely because of his recent findings. Just days before the detainment, he published yet another major investigation exposing scores of former members of Ukraine’s riot police formation Berkut now serving the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus.
During the EuroMaidan Revolution of 2013-2014 that ousted corrupt pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych, the Berkut units were violently quelling the popular protests in downtown Kyiv, and were disbanded and ostracized following the revolution’s victory.
Nonetheless, many former Berkut officers fled and continued serving dictator regimes in Russia and Belarus, according to numerous media reports, including Ivashin’s.
Just a day before the arrest, the journalist was interviewed by the Russian-language TV channel Current Time regarding his Berkut investigation.
“(During searches), the Belarus KGB operatives were looking for anything relating Dzianis to Ukraine,” InformNapalm reported on March 13. Two days later, it became known that the Belarusian authorities had extended his arrest term by two months.
Being a Belarusian citizen, Ivashin also has the legal status of “a foreign Ukrainian.” The status can be acquired by the citizens of third states that have Ukrainian roots.
On March 15, Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reacted to the arrest, saying that the journalist’s work “has been drawing the world’s attention to the crimes committed in the course of the Russian aggression against Ukraine.”
“The ministry is convinced that journalistic activity can not be and should not be a reason for persecution,” the statement reads.
“His detention is even more concerning taking into account further attacks on the freedom of speech, endangering the lives and well-being of journalists in Belarus. We demand the trial to be transparent and fair.”
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