Sports journalist Dzmitry Selviastruk released

Accord­ing to infor­ma­tion received by human rights defend­ers, jour­nal­ist Dzmit­ry Selvi­as­truk was released from a cor­rec­tion­al facil­i­ty on March 7, 2026, hav­ing ful­ly served his sen­tence.

His Telegram chan­nel Sil­ver Age. Foot­ball of Belarus came back to life on March 22 after near­ly a three-year hia­tus. On April 10, it was updat­ed with a post:

“Good after­noon. This is the chan­nel’s author writ­ing. Thanks to every­one who remem­bered me. It’s still very hard for me to get myself togeth­er, but I’m work­ing on it. I fol­lowed our foot­ball as much as I could. Sad­dened, to be hon­est, but there are enough pos­i­tive moments too. I don’t want to aban­don the chan­nel. So expect new posts, although every­thing is still chal­leng­ing for now.”

Background

Dzmit­ry Selvi­as­truk is 36 years old. He grad­u­at­ed from the Fac­ul­ty of Jour­nal­ism at Belaru­sian State Uni­ver­si­ty, worked for some time at the state-owned Nar­o­d­naya Gaze­ta cov­er­ing social issues and writ­ing about the IT indus­try. He grad­u­al­ly shift­ed to sports news and began col­lab­o­rat­ing with the themed web resource Football.by. Three years ago, he launched his own project — a Telegram chan­nel about Belaru­sian foot­ball, Sil­ver Age. Foot­ball of Belarus.

The jour­nal­ist was detained on May 10, 2023. He was ini­tial­ly pun­ished twice with admin­is­tra­tive deten­tion on charges of dis­trib­ut­ing “extrem­ist” con­tent.

While Selvi­as­truk was serv­ing admin­is­tra­tive deten­tion time, he was also charged crim­i­nal­ly with facil­i­tat­ing extrem­ist activ­i­ties.

In Octo­ber 2023, Min­sk City Court sen­tenced Dzmit­ry to three years in prison. The tri­al was con­duct­ed by judge Svi­at­lana Chara­pana­va.

Read­ers of the Sil­ver Age. Foot­ball of Belarus Telegram chan­nel spec­u­lat­ed that the grounds for Selvi­as­truk’s deten­tion could have been crit­i­cal posts about cer­tain cham­pi­onship clubs and sports offi­cials. Accord­ing to sub­scribers’ obser­va­tions, the Telegram chan­nel often report­ed var­i­ous insid­er infor­ma­tion based on rumors and com­ments from var­i­ous sports forums.

On Octo­ber 17, 2023, Belaru­sian human rights defend­ers rec­og­nized Dzmit­ry as a polit­i­cal pris­on­er.

On Decem­ber 8, 2023, the Min­istry of Inter­nal Affairs added Selvi­as­truk to the List of Belaru­sian, For­eign Nation­als, and State­less Per­sons Involved in Extrem­ist Activ­i­ties.